You wouldn’t eat MacDonald’s if it was the only food in town, and you wouldn’t spray Monsanto’s herbicide in your garden. So why have you got Microsoft on your PC?

The most successful monopolists are those who are so pervasive you don’t even notice they are there. They convince us that it’s not important, and that there isn’t any alternative anyway. As more and more human activity relies on computers, the question of who controls those computers becomes a matter of vital public interest. As of today, the world’s computers are dominated by one company’s products – Microsoft.

Microsoft Inc is the ultimate US corporate success story of the last century. It is a fabulously successful monopolist, with around 90% market share of the world’s PCs. It generates astonishing profits – £1.3 billion in the first quarter of 2005. Two of its board are ranked among the world’s ten richest individuals – its founder, Bill Gates, has topped the annual Forbes rich list for eleven years in succession.

And it has achieved all this despite the fact that its core competency is rolling out copies of products originally launched by ther companies – windows (Xerox); spreadsheets (VisiCorp); word processors (MicroPro); to name but three. Microsoft is the perfect proof that if you strike lucky at the start and are a ruthless enough monopolist thereafter, you’re pretty well invulnerable.

The key to why Microsoft has been able to dominate the software market lies in the curious way software is written and sold. For historical reasons, most software is produced in two stages. First of all, developers write the programs. This ‘source code’ is then converted by a computer into the software you buy and install on your computer. This finished software can only be read by computers – it’s just gobbledegook to the human eye.

This is very fortunate for software companies. When the first cars arrived in lesser developed economies, it didn’t take long for the locals to strip them down, learn how to maintain them and adapt them to local conditions, and eventually build industries to produce their own. Because software is sold in coded form, you can’t do this. Indeed, the licences under which software is sold impose dire penalties for anyone who even attempts to ‘reverse engineer’ the product – i.e. work out the source code. It’s like selling cars with the bonnets welded shut, and making trying to look inside a legal offence.

This ability to ship software without revealing the source code has given Microsoft an extraordinary stranglehold on the world’s PCs. Microsoft started life as just a supplier of the basic ‘operating system’ needed to make a PC work. By keeping the source code secret, whenever Microsoft decided to launch a new product, it could make life very tricky for competitors. It was playing all its football matches on its home ground, and if the playing field wasn’t always exactly level, that was just too bad.

One by one, Microsoft was able to target new areas for growth and destroy the competition. Since 1990, regulators around the world have railed ineffectively against this behaviour, with actions dragging on for years through the courts before typically being settled out-of-court with a derisory fine. In the meantime, the competitors give up and do something else.

As Microsoft proves, keeping source code secret makes monopoly easy. It also creates wider problems for society. At the crudest level, users of a software package can suddenly find it has ‘expired’ – the program has been told to self-destruct at some date in the future to make sure the users buy a new version. Once a PC is connected to the Internet, software can be programmed to send details of what’s on the computer back to some monitoring point. Or the PC could be programmed to malfunction on receipt of a secret signal over the internet (no doubt this has not escaped the notice of the US National Security Administration, one of Microsoft’s biggest customers).

With secret source code, a PC user has to have blind faith in the software supplier – and the government agencies in the supplier’s country of origin.

This is bad enough on home PCs, but as we becomes more and more dependent on computers, secret source code becomes a serious threat to society. The effects of this were all too clear at the time of the much hyped ‘millennium bug’. From air traffic control to intensive care units, from nuclear power stations to cash machines, those responsible for the running of critical computer systems were in a state of near panic. Without the source code, no-one could check whether a system would still work when the millennium clock hit midnight. Who had the source code for these systems? did anyone still understand it? how could they prove no-one had changed the code since their system was built? what if the supplier had gone out of business? The cost of this little episode may never be known; most estimates suggest at least $500bn worldwide.

It is important to note that this obsession with commercial secrecy is a comparatively recent phenomenon, and is quite alien to the scientific / engineering community. Academic tradition is based around open publication, so that new theories, experimental results, etc. are subject to peer review. The more eyes, the better the result. An open process leads to penicillin – a closed process gives the world Paxil – Seroxat and other ‘dodgy drugs’.

Commercial software companies despise an open process and insist on secret source. The result of this is obvious – the ‘crashes’ and ‘bugs’ that are our everyday experience of software. The good news is that there is an alternative, though not yet as obvious to the general public. Millions of people around the world – many of whom work for commercial software companies in their ‘day jobs’ – participate in the creation and support of ‘open source’ software. Open source means the programs are available for anyone to read, learn from, criticise, and contribute to. Once a sufficient community has developed around the software, high quality software can be developed at remarkable speed.

This open-source development represents a community based revolt against the big commercial software companies. It has been dramatically successful behind the scenes – the majority of the websites on the Internet are run on open-source software; the most common system for sending emails round the world is open source; and Linux – a complete Microsoft Windows replacement – is now widely used both privately and by big companies. Now open source is facing up to the next challenge – taking on Microsoft as the provider of software on everyday PCs.

This battle is being fought with particular vigour in developing economies. Last year, the rival economies of South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam all embarked on ambitious projects to get hundreds of thousands of basic PCs into the hands of their citizens. Young people were particular targets.

In the West, going to a store and equipping a PC with the basic tools from Microsoft (Windows and Office) costs about $500. In developing economies, this is simply unaffordable (for example, in Vietnam this equates to 18 months’ average wages). Adopting open-source makes huge financial sense for developing economies.

When the Thai government announced plans to ship one million PCs to its citizens in 2004, its Sinsamut PC was priced at $270 and was based on open-source software like Linux. A similar picture emerged in Indonesia, with a $260 Gemilang PC equipped with Linux and OpenOffice.org (an open-source equivalent of Microsoft Office).

But open source is not just about saving developing economies valuable foreign currency. Governments suspicious of US intentions can guarantee their independence through open source they can inspect. Students can not only run open-source programs on their computers; they can actually look at the source code and learn how the software works. As their skills grow, they can join in the development process.

Open-source development is a pure meritocracy – contributions are valued equally from highly-paid computer professionals in the US who do open source as a hobby, through to students struggling through college in the third world. Using skills developed in open source, local companies can go on to build real software businesses, rather than just supplying services based on US products.

Open source is also bridging the digital divide in other ways. There are estimated to be over eight thousand languages in the world today. Producing commercial software in all these languages is impossible. OpenOffice.org is one of the biggest open-source programs in the world, yet a group of volunteers was able to translate it into Vietnamese in a fortnight. India has 22 official languages – its Ministry of Communications and Information Technology marked the start of the Tamil New Year this year by showing off a complete bundle of open-source computer software in Tamil, including the localized Tamil version of OpenOffice.org. Three million free CDs will be distributed through schools and libraries. A Hindi language version is next on the list.

Microsoft is of course not standing idly by. In the developed world, the company spends millions of dollars on advertising and on corporate hospitality. Any customer who looks like deviating off the Microsoft track is given incentives to get back on message, from the lowly London Borough of Newham to entire countries such as Peru. In response to the low cost PCs for the masses campaigns in Asia, Microsoft rapidly responded with a special Thai language version of Windows and Office for $40; a special Bahasa Malaysia version of its software for $40; and most recently an immediate 30% discount on its Tamil language version.

However, Microsoft is shrewd enough to realise that these actions only buy time. Secret source companies have been busy securing patents in the US at an incredible rate. Open-source developers (and the UK Patent Office) believe there are between 150,000 and 300,000 registered software patents in the US which should never have been granted. What better way of protecting a monopoly than the threat of being dragged through the US courts for patent infringement by Microsoft’s hugely well-funded legal department?

Microsoft is hammering this message home. Following the rapid uptake of open-source software in South-east Asia, Microsoft summoned national representatives to its Asian Government Leaders Forum in Singapore last September. Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer warned delegates that Linux violated at least 228 patents, and countries using Linux which entered the World Trade Organisation would be at risk.

Microsoft is also active in the Intellectual Property Rights and Digital Rights Management fields, which aim to enforce its monopoly through the courts and through technology. Microsoft’s games platform, the X-Box, was designed to make it impossible to run anything other than Microsoft software. Microsoft would dearly like to introduce the same techniques into all PCs under the guise of ‘enhanced security’. Your PC would then only run software ‘approved’ by Microsoft.

This ultimate monopoly is possible, but not inevitable. There are open-source alternatives available today for the Microsoft key products: replace Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc) with OpenOffice.org; replace Internet Explorer with Mozilla Firefox; and replace Outlook with Mozilla Thunderbird or Evolution. All these open-source alternatives run on a Microsoft Windows PC, so you can try them until you are comfortable with them. The final stage is to ditch Microsoft Windows entirely and replace it with one of the Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu. It’s a small step to take to free your PC.