Read Against Intellectual Monopoly for Free Online

appeared in
March 1993, but it was only in August 1995 that Microsoft released Internet
Explorer 1.0.3
    Try to imagine how the economic and social history of the past fifteen
years would have to be rewritten if the creators of Mosaic had Microsoft's
deep pockets and, in anticipation of Amazon patenting the one-click concept, had managed to patent the idea of the Web browser. Would we all have
been better served by such an application of the doctrine of "intellectual
property"?
Open-Source Software
    The best evidence that copyright and patents are not needed and that competition leads to thriving innovation in the software industry is the fact that
there is a thriving and innovative portion of the industry that has voluntarily relinquished its intellectual monopoly - both copyright and patent.
This striking example of creation under competition is the open-source
software movement. Often this software is released under a license that is the opposite of copyright - in many cases forcing those who wish to sell it to
allow their competitors to copy it. This "copyleft" agreement is a voluntary
commitment by software producers to avoid intellectual monopoly and to
operate under conditions of free competition.4

    It is an amazing testament to the benefits of competition that firms and
individuals choose to voluntarily subject themselves to it. How, you ask,
can it be in the economic self-interest of a firm or individual to voluntarily
relinquish a monopoly? The answer is that it provides an important assurance to purchasers. For example, a new entry into the software market may
find its market limited by the fact that potential customers are concerned
about the long-term viability of the firm. Purchasers do not wish to become
locked into proprietary software, only to see the sole legal supplier disappear. For obvious reasons, firms and individuals also have a preference for
purchasing software where they expect to benefit from future competition.
In some cases, the income from being first to market is sufficiently high that
it is worth voluntarily giving up a future monopoly to be able to enter the
market.
    In the case of open-source software, the startling fact is how widespread
it is, a fact our wrong-shaded glasses often prevents us from noticing. If you
browsed the Web today, then it is virtually certain that you used open-source
software. Although you probably think of yourself as a Windows user or
a Mac user, the fact is that you are also a Linux user: every time you use
Google, your request is processed by the open-source software originated
by Linus Torvalds.
    In addition to Windows and Mac, there are three other widely used
operating environments: Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD. Solaris, Linux, and
FreeBSD are all open source, and so is a good chunk of the Mac code. In
the server market, Google is scarcely exceptional - it is estimated that the
Linux operating system has a 25 percent market share.5 Not only Google
uses Linux - so does the widely used TiVo digital video recorder. Even in
desktops, Linux is estimated to be passing Mac in popularity.
    A great deal of the data you find on the Internet - for example, that
amusing blog about the shenanigans of Washington politicians you are
reading - is stored in databases. There are six major databases: Oracle, DB2,
SQL Server, Sybase, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Two are open source, and
the odds are that the blog you are reading uses the open source MySQL
database - along with the open-source scripting language PHP. MySQL,
by the way, is developed and supported by a private, for-profit company,
as is the scripting language PHP. In addition, PHP has recently supplanted
the open-source Perl language as the premier scripting language for the World Wide Web, and four of the other widely used scripting languages,
Lua, Python, Ruby, and Tcl, are also open source. Only the Microsoft ASP
language is proprietary.

    Open source dominates the Internet.