The Coming Software Revolution

The growing adoption of collaborative software development will change the global software industry by altering its economics of scale, location, and price. The growth of non-proprietary code will depress prices in the proprietary sector, and the possession of source code will enable the growth of more software industrial centers around the world; their emergence will threaten the business of current leaders. National governments which see themselves as disadvantaged or even threatened by the current software powers will encourage collaborative software development and the services that this development model drives. Only world-wide draconic legislation by the current software powers has any hope of preserving the status quo.