The top tech giants of the computer industry have become decidedly progressive, which is a far cry from how things were in the 1980s. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, there were many vendors coming out with their own version of UNIX, and this competition lead to a great deal of innovation of the platform. Companies back then were universally apolitical, and simply focused on coming out with great technology, and making profits from it. However, with the advent of Linux, and its support eventually by IBM, which resulted in a capable version of UNIX that was distributed for free in the market, the UNIX market took an economic beating, until today, UNIX is all but dead. Now there is very little money in UNIX / Linux in and of itself – where before it was a multibillion dollar industry, creating many developer jobs, and generating huge amounts of tax revenue.

Linux (an Open Source software) in and of itself wasn’t bad. What was bad, was the license it was distributed under: the GNU General Public License, or GPL for short. It was a software license that was hostile to the monetization of software, insisting that code licensed under it, be freely distributed and used by anyone. What was particularly toxic, was the idea that this type of license and similar licenses, be applied to more and more third party software sold to computer users. This had the economic deadening effect of Linux on client computer operating systems, word processor and other productivity software, etc. So while more than ten years ago, the computing landscape had several profitable word processor software companies, which were competing and driving innovation, all that has virtually stopped, and Microsoft is now seeing long continued declines in profits of its Windows client operating system.

A lot of customers are cheering over Open Source software, and how it has made things cheaper for consumers. The problem is that Open Source software has allowed the top computer companies in the world to decimate their competition, by driving value out of many of the various computer software markets they play in. These large computer companies are able to do this by leveraging profits from other software segments, or monetizing certain market segments uniquely, because of the sheer scale of their operations. So instead of consumers seeing innovation taking place because of competition between players in a market where software has value, they see innovation only by the dominant player in that market. This of course has lead to an unprecedented level of control by top computer companies over consumers, an overall decline in innovation, as well as the elimination of choice.

Please note that I’m not against Open Source software. What I’m against, is the use of Open Source software by various parties to destroy different software market segments. Activist groups and top computer companies do this, in an effort to accomplish their goals at the cost of economic activity, jobs, and tax revenue.

As if the widespread adoption of Open Source software is not enough, top computer companies and tech media, are now pushing a decidedly progressive agenda. All pretense of being politically neutral is now gone. The alliance now openly pushes climate change, feminism, globalism, the LGBT agenda, etc. There is no more pure love of technology, and rooting for your tech company ‘team’. Everyone must now fall in line with the progressive agenda, and if you resist, you are brow beaten into doing so. I believe this contributed to the Donald Trump presidential win.