The End of Monopoly Rents? A brief missive re. a pairs trade for the rest of the decade.

Like many others, I love firefox! The primary reason that firefox is superior to internet explorer: people work hard in a decentralized manner to improve firefox and then give away their work for FREE! In the process, the open source crowd makes the Redmond-campus look like goose-stepping fascists or mindless, drone Borgs.

Just as there is a secular outsourcing of labor from high wage countries to low wage countries, there finally may be a secular movement away from the serfdom of monopoly rents, towards the open source movement. The plentiful access of broadband connections and computing power allowa anyone with skill to have a good product distributed around the world. Traditionally, economists raise the classic "free-rider" problem, ie good, free things are underproduced while negative externalities are overproduced. However, the tech bubble has made the marginal cost of producing certain knowledge-based equal zero (like software), while the fixed costs of production (a developer's time, grief, etc.) gets spread over millions of users.

Mozilla developers, Google plugin writers and the like don't get paid in the traditional sense, ie cash. However, I presume that widespread recognition as the author of very useful software to mozilla brings forth a high level of praise from the software cognescenti (which is then transformed/monetized into better job prospects, salary, etc). Thankfully, due to their hard work I can browse more efficiently with mozilla without google text ads, flash ads and check out cool sites like this.

So the question becomes.....will Microsoft be the RCA of the 21st century? Will Google embrace the open source movement? Should the trade of the decade be long RHAT and short MSFT?