Re: Wall Street article on a new Cooperative

  I posted the original article. I think it is a movement towards open 
source- empowering the consumer whomever he, she, or it might be.

I only take responsibility for my own rants ;->

-Jean

On Monday, April 19, 2004, at 09:55 PM, Benjamin J. Tilly wrote:

> David Fetter <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 19, 2004 at 01:23:26PM -0400, L Jean Camp wrote:
> [...]
>> And speaking of trust, I trust these greedy, short-sighted sons of
>> bitches about as far as I can throw them.  They are *not* operating in
>> the public interest, even by accident.
>
> You are mistaken in that one.  As a personal example, I am
> benefitting right now from the fact that AOL acted in the public
> interest in buying Netscape and keeping the Mozilla code-base
> alive.
>
> Corporations are not actively malicious, just actively cynical,
> manipulative, and self-centered.  If acting in the public interest
> is temporarily in their interest, they will not hold back from
> doing so because they might do you a favour.  Of course the fact
> that they act in your interest in one second won't stop them from
> acting against your interest in the next.
>
> The example that I just used works for that as well.  As soon as
> AOL finished using the fact that they _could_ go to Mozilla as a
> bargaining chip with Microsoft, getting good terms for continued
> access to Internet Explorer for many years to come, they cut the
> Mozilla team adrift.
>
> Barring management being unable to figure out what its own best
> interests are (actually a significant issue), you can trust
> corporations to behave fairly _predictably_.  Understand their
> motivations and you can know where and when you can trust them -
> and how far.
>
> Suggested reading, _Information Rules_ and _The Logic of
> Collective Action_.  Incidentally the latter made me aware of
> exactly how the small exploit the great, which is something that
> I'm often reminded of when I read rants about how corporations
> should get together and fund more open source software.
>
> Cheers,
> Ben
>