[Marxism] Capitalist consolidation of high tech

[J Rothermel <jayroth6@xxxxxxx>]

List comrades may be interested in the email below I received today from 
a tech-savvy comrade.
 
Comradely,
Jay Rothermel


Nortel completes sale of Alteon for $18 million - InternetNews:The Blog 
- Sean Michael Kerner
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/04/nortel-completes-sale-of-alteo.html

This is an $8 billion asset that competitor Radware gets at a firesale 
price due to Nortel's collapse. A little digging will show documentation 
points for overproduction in networking infrastructure dating back as 
far as the dotcom collapse and growing progressively worse even though 
manufacturers, and their shills in the technical press, professional 
journals and mass media kept pointing to the piles of money on the floor 
just waiting to be picked up. Another such sign is in today's 
announcement that IBM has indeed acquired SUN microsystems under similar 
conditions. This brings roughly 2/3 of the Unix market under the 
controll of IBM as well as software patents that augment those that IBM 
is already pushing through the Open Source channels (read here-- an 
effort to CoOpt a movement to provide non-comercial alternatives to 
resources dominated by monopoly capitalism). This is all a bit obscure 
to those outside this industry. As I see it, IBM helps open source to 
the extent that such help shows some promise of weakening its capitalist 
competitors (e.g., Microsoft) while posing little threat to the 
interests of IBM. This might mean, e.g., releasing into public domain 
patented software, or expert technical advice, that would advance the 
efforts of those creating a free browser-- Microsoft is trying to sell 
IE8 while IBM is not selling a browser.







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