“Are you a Microsoft investor? Be afraid. Be very afraid. By
2010 Windows will be as dead as CP/M, and every Windows-based
software vendor will be either supporting Linux or out of
business.“
“Proprietary ownership of source code has in the past allowed
large corporations to dominate the software market because they
could modify their existing proprietary code more cheaply than
others without access to it could rewrite from scratch. This
allowed extraction of monopoly rents from customers, with the usual
happy results for the seller and unhappy results for customers and
the economy as a whole.”
“The growth of the Internet has now put the shoe on the other
foot: It has made cooperation so cheap, and the set of cooperating
Linux developers so large, that Linux now not only has a programmer
force dwarfing anything Microsoft can field (with a doubling time
measured in months), but an existing codebase dwarfing that
available to all but the very largest corporations. The Linux
codebase consists of about one hundred million lines of code, which
at the accepted industry rate of $100/line, represents an effective
capital investment of ten billion dollars.”