“If the WW II generation was The Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers were The Worst. … And while he has the potential to do a lot for the world by giving away his money to other people … I see that the proprietary development model Gates’s generation adopted has stifled the progress of technology they should have provided to us. ”

— I find it really amusing to see a single paragraph that both touts the Boomers as the worst generation (no argument here) and yet also seems to embody such a grandiose sense of entitlement. I don’t think it was intentional, but that doesn’t make it any less striking. Sure, perhaps any number of billionaires and IT types could have showered us with all sorts of wonderful things out of the kindness of their hearts, from money to technology, but ultimately it’s their call. The singularity is coming, proprietary software or not, and when individuals don’t have any choice in what happens to the results of their work, someone or other is going to turn the Great Filter into a brick wall.

The problem really does boil down to motivation. I think that in the end, “it works” will be enough. Proprietary software might be a dead end, but so is a social system where people aren’t allowed to find that out for themselves.

The big obstacle is probably the need to decide on a common platform and design an architecture acceptable for all (and this for every domain).