Share the Wealth

Because it is becoming increasingly challenging to protect intellectual property, we’re witnessing a complete reversal:  Instead of protecting new ideas and proprietary systems, some developers are now making them available to customers, suppliers, and even competitors.

The most obvious example of this trend is the open source software movement, which has its roots in the Silicon Valley “shareware” culture of the 1970s that spawned Apple computer.  Open source got its biggest boost when Linux Torvalds posted the “kernel code for Li.....