from the hearts-and-minds dept.
In an essay for the New York Times ("Whose Intellectual Property Is It, Anyway? The Open Source War," 24 August 2000), author Peter Wayner (Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans (HarperBusiness, 2000) ) declares:
"There's a war going on. . . . It is between nimble people who want to think for themselves and big dinosaurs of corporations that want to keep the upstarts penned up and docile."
Wayner concludes: "The open-source war is not going to be easy for society. The intellectual property laws do help protect creators and their innovations, and corporations instinctively grab as much power as they can get. But if the strength of these laws grows and the teams of lawyers that enforce them become more powerful, society will become much poorer."
In a related article from 20 April 2000, Virginia Postrel, Editor-at-Large for Reason Magazine, comments on the incentives — both economic and noneconomic — that help drive the open source software movement.
