| You wrote: "Now the only part I disagree with is the last part. Laws and regulations got us into this mess in the first place. These companies are huge because they can sue or prevent others from competing through laws and regulations." I think this is dangerously wrong. It completely glosses over and overlooks the fact that economies of scale are real and larger organizations can solve larger problems. The guy with the machine gun will win the karate tournament if the tournament has no rules. Rules are necessary to create a level playing field when power distributions are asymmetric. You don't need laws on your side when you can just buy up your upstart competitors, or price them out of the market with loss leaders. In this context, one of the few tools the community has to create a level playing field, is software licensing. In particular, *GPL style licenses tend to make things much fairer, by imposing rules on all parties that prevent one from profiting asymmetrically off the work of the others. Open Source, of the permissive variety, does the opposite. Corporations can use the code as they wish and not give back to the community. Community efforts to compete are always at a disadvantage because anything good they create can be folded into the proprietary solutions. So closed, built on open, beats purely open. |
It's a Catch-22 when the rules (laws written on paper) were what made the power distributions so greatly asymmetric in the first place.
This is quite obvious when studying tribal cultures as compared to civilized cultures. It's also worth noting the inherent distributed organizational design of tribal cultures as compared to the inherently centralized design of civilized cultures.
>Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we didn't have any delinquents. Without a prison, there can't be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white man arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.
-Lame Deer