[plug] [OT kinda] Noam Chomsky on Microsoft

[sol]

Some might be interested in what one of the most important academics of our 
time and America's leading political dissident has to say about Microsoft and 
private ownership of the internet.


http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=1408

some choice quotes:
"As late as about 1994, people like say, Bill Gates, had no interest in the 
Internet. He wouldn't even go to conferences about it, because he didn't see 
a way to make a profit from it. Now it's being handed over to private 
corporations, and they tell you pretty much what they want to do. They want 
to take large parts of the Internet and cut it out of the public domain 
altogether, turn it into intranets, which are fenced off with firewalls, and 
used simply for internal corporate operations."

"So how does Microsoft achieve its enormous profits? Well, Bill Gates is 
pretty frank about it. He says they do it by "embracing and extending" the 
ideas of others. They're based on computers, for example. Computers were 
created at public expense and public initiative. In the 1950s when they were 
being developed, it was about 100% public expense. The same is true of the 
Internet. The ideas, the initiatives, the software, the hardware -- these 
were created for about 30 years at public initiative and expense, and it's 
just now being handed over to guys like Bill Gates."

sol