How to avoid getting inadvertedly sandwiched

[ Thanks to Erik Poupaert for this link. ]

"There are the following secret agreements in place:

* The hardware vendor secretly negotiates with the OS vendor not to publish a device driver for any other OS, and to keep the source code and specifiations for the wire protocol secret.
* The OS vendor, in exchange promises that the next version for his OS will not support the device drivers for the previous version.
* The cartel of proprietary software vendors promises to publish the next version of their software that is only able to run on the next version of the OS and not on the previous version. The cartel also makes sure that the new document formats cannot be understood by the older versions of their programs."

Complete Story

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