The Conference of Socialist Economists (in the UK) last year organised a meeting by a speaker who argued convincingly that the internet was an arena where the economics of cooperation were more rational than the economics of capitalist competition.
The two are finely balanced, but cooperation although slower, draws on the social sense of thousands, probably tens of thousands, of net-citizens who will work scores of hours only to contribute to sorting out a shareware bug to help make one bit of software fit in better with another. Microsoft has certainly made its billions, but as it chases one version of its product with another it may not win foreever.
A significant step the speaker suggested, was Netscape releasing its source code, to throw in its lot with the cooperative sector to defend itself against Microsoft.
It raises two interesting questions in my mind.
1) a practical one: as marxism-space (the network of overlapping serious marxism discussion lists) expands and differentiates, perhaps the time will come for one operating share-ware type software, so people can switch. Or if there is one already - probably is - perhaps we only have to facilitate cross communication between different lists.
(When is the old Spoons web page of links going to get updated and be readily accessible to web searches ??)
2) Should leftists automatically back anti-trust legislation in this field? It is the reformist solution that keeps capitalism on the road. Supposing the campaign against Miscrosoft was not that it should be "fair" to other capitalist corporations, but that in return for a semi-monopoly position it would be inspected, and would offer to support compatability with share ware.....
Just suppose...
Chris Buford
London