When you save files in one system and could not open it properly in another, or when there are obstacles for you to switch across systems easily, you may be getting caught in "crossfire", or intense competition between or among software entities. Some people call it "software war."
As in the real war, the public is the last to know that it is going on. When it comes to software war, it is a surprise that the war is being fought in pursuit of so-called "public interest." This paper is able to document very objectively the software war in 1999, in the midst of antitrust controversies against Microsoft. For a more recent article about the issue, click here.
Here are some clippings from the paper:
The Origins and Future of Open Source Software
A NetAction White Paper
The success of government intervention in nurturing new economic sectors [such as the Internet] is often rewarded by the creation of a private sector interest in blocking further government action.
..the founders [from government] who initially cultivated the ethic of freely sharing information and software are now fighting for profit share and private ownership of intellectual property.
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Technology firms have tried to create substitutes for government through private consortia like CommerceNet and other standards bodies, but none have the core of public-interested officials that government can wield to transcend particularistic company concerns in favor of the public interest.
Microsoft responded with a combination of in-house software applications and developer tools optimized for its proprietary standards, creating an all-pervasive computing environment that promised any corporation that its needs would be met. The Microsoft solution might be less innovative than any particular competitor, but Microsoft's very completeness and pervasiveness across all sectors of computing would make up for its rigidity.
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With the need to generate stronger global support for its standards, Netscape took the unprecedented step in March 1998 of publicly revealing its browser source code--the usually top-secret guts of any program. Netscape invited developers to modify the code and even resell their own version as long as any modifications to the code were republished publicly and made according to the terms of their license, and subject to coordination by the development team at Mozilla.org.
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The idea was that Netscape could release existing modifications in its continual upgrades of both browser and server software. What it lost by giving up control of its code, it would make up through selling customized business versions and server software, and by preventing Microsoft's control of standards which would be Netscape's deathknell.
Netscape's action highlights the continued importance of public interest-oriented software development. This type of software has survived much of the privatization of the Internet. Most dramatically, despite the focus on the Microsoft-Netscape rivalry, the most popular Web server on the Internet was neither company's but rather a free, open source server called Apache.. The result was a Web server that in 1997 was used in 44 percent of Internet sites, compared to just 16 percent that used Microsoft and 12 percent using Netscape's software.. Similarly, one of the favorite Web programming languages is a free and open language named perl which has similarly been modified and improved through a global network of collaborators coordinated by programmer Larry Wall.
Netscape also announced that it would begin making all its software applications available in the Linux operating system, a freeware version of UNIX that has become the fastest expanding operating system in the world with three to nine million copies on computers around the world. Linux was described by Wired magazine in 1997
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as "[Window] NT's most serious competitor, the only viable alternative to the Microsoft monoculture."
Remarkably, Linux was born in 1991 by a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland whose first name, Linus, led to the naming of the language. At that point, a whole series of free and open source UNIX tools had been developed by programmers connected to GNU (a self-referencing title standing for GNU is Not Unix) foundation, itself founded by one of the original MIT hackers, Richard Stallman, who objected to the increasing commercialization of university research. Stallman and his fellow GNU hackers had, rightly, feared that despite the fact that popular UNIX standards like Sun's were broadly distributed, they still remained under private ownership and could and would be used for proprietary advantage under the right (or wrong) circumstances. Which is what happened by the early 90s.
The community of GNU programmers and users sought a nonproprietary UNIX alternative to escape the new UNIX standards wars between competing commercial providers. What this network of free software developers lacked was the core of the operating system, called a "kernel," which would tie all the GNU UNIX tools together into an alternative to the commercial UNIX competitors.
Linus Torvalds wrote that kernel and from his university post would use the Internet to coordinate improvements in this new operating system with help from hundreds of enthusiasts around the globe.
Based on what GNU called "copyleft" principles, the Linux operating system could be distributed freely or packaged with documentation and sold for modest amounts backed by technical support by companies like Red Hat, Caldera and Cygnus Solutions. Extremely popular in developing nations like South Africa, Cuba, India and the Philippines, Linux also began to eclipse other forms of UNIX in the U.S. partly because of its price but also because many people considered it technically the best operating system in existence. Linux was the first operating system to include Java capability, so every increase in Java programs adds to its functionality.
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Without expectation of financially capturing the social benefits of their creation, [collaborators on open source software] are free to innovate without restriction.
With Microsoft's proprietary approaches gaining ground, Netscape and other Silicon Valley actors reluctantly saw their alternative commercial standards losing ground and saw an alliance with the global open source software model as necessary for survival. They would forgo some profits in order to maintain the priority on innovation that gives them an advantage in the remaining commercial aspects of technology development.
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So with all this good news, open source software might seem to be an antidote to the threat of Microsoft's monopoly. At least that was the argument Microsoft executives were making in court in January [1999]. Of course, even Microsoft's in-house political magazine, Slate, noted the irony that everything the executives described about "Windows' impending obsolescence and its rivals' virtues [was] exactly the opposite of what Microsoft tells consumers and corporate clients."
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Many critics of the Microsoft suit raise reasonable concerns that a purely negative, restrictive approach to punishing Microsoft might inhibit innovation at the company without necessarily creating a viable competitor. Promoting open source software is the positive policy option that the government should employ to encourage the sort of innovation and competition that is needed to truly end the Microsoft monopoly.
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