Computer Industry

Considering the Computing System as a whole is the most natural thing; but this is not what the computer industry (a political term) does and provides to its purchasers. Instead, the computer industry imposes a layered paradigm where:

an Operating System, maintained exclusively and jealously by a computer vendor?'s team, provides the lower layers of interaction with the machine, while
applications are secretly written by software corporations, that
programs are privately developed by engineering companies, that are used by
end-users, customers who can only choose which master they will be the slave of.

This paradigm, based on secrecy and coarse-grained delivery, generates wondrous revenues to computer corporations, while the customer, who must pay for these or be a pirate, obtains very low service quality:

Corporations and intermediates earn a lot of money at each step of this commercial chain.
Because of secrecy, they also can impose arbitrary fees to those in the next link of the chain to use their products.
The imposition of secrecy also forbids any kind of lawful competition based on rightful arguments and objective comparison.
By providing coarse-grained software, they can sell the same fine-grained modules several times to the same customer, sometimes without bringing any new modules really useful to them.
By maintaining this secret clustering, they forbid third parties to provide replacements or extensions for their flawed tools, but by short-circuiting them.
By the former, they a brake on computer progress, and deprive customers from reliable computerware adapted to their needs.
By maintaining this system, they also create monopolies, which allows them to impose arbitrarily high prices disproportionate with actual service rendered and development cost.

Of course, all this layering is purely arbitrary, with no efficiency or design ease reason. The victim is the next link of the chain (sometimes all links, when a corporation is present in the whole chain), and ultimately, the customer.

At the end this system recalls that used in the mafia, some sects, and actually is the same as in any hierarchically organized mob. But don't take it wrong, and let's just analyze why this happens. Firstly, there is no such thing as a world-wide conspiracy against the customer. Instead, there is a wild competition, where everyone is looking for his own short-term profit, without any law or regulation organism, without any professional ethics. That is, we face some law-of-the-strongest anarchy, which naturally structures itself in this mob-like organization. The Tunes project strives to provide means for a fair competition to appear.

See also Computing Freedom, Computing Liberalism, Programmers?, Users?, End-Users.

This page is linked from: Committee End-Users Grain Operating System