Devil's Advocate: Plutocracy not democracy

Martin Brampton gives his take on the individuals who did and did not make silicon.com's Agenda Setters poll of the top movers and shakers in the IT industry.

Although I was a member of the panel for this year's Agenda Setters poll, in true Devil's Advocate style I am going to dissent from the official list. This is a risky thing to do, since it is well known that groups are better at prediction than any individual within the group. But I will give reasons.

We are regularly told that we live in freedom under democratic rule. This is, unfortunately, not strictly true. Our freedom is tightly circumscribed, and politicians are now keen to curtail it altogether without giving reasons. The word 'democracy', based on Greek, means roughly 'power to the people', whereas one could argue that another Greek-based word is more appropriate - plutocracy.

For in many respects our societies are controlled by the very wealthy. How else can we account for the steady increase in the proportion of wealth controlled by a quite small group? Or the double-digit percentage salary increases achieved year after year by directors of large companies? It is also believed that in most countries, elections are now won by the party with the most money.

With that background, it is hardly surprising if the silicon.com Agenda Setters poll is predominantly chief executives of large companies, key members of the plutocracy. Yet money is not yet all, as ideas continue to have significant influence in our complex, information-based societies. And the influence of senior executives is to a significant extent played out within an agenda that is determined by people who create new technologies - people who are frequently unrecognised and poorly rewarded.

Some of them make it to the agenda setters list, as Tim Berners-Lee's regular appearance testifies. All the same, the purveyors of what is now prejudicially called 'digital rights management' are a good deal more prominent in the list. The idea that all information is product, to be bought and sold at a profit, undermines much of what has been achieved.

After all, many of the inventions that are important today were made a good many years ago, at least in their basic form. They were made at a time when many scientists and technologists in both universities and industry believed firmly in open publication of scientific work. One of the few things that commands wide support from economists is the belief that free exchange of information is good for the economy.

It is, therefore, disappointing that the one significant movement within IT that challenges the DRM trend is poorly represented. That is open source software. As even quite simple hardware devices come to boast a processor, software is increasingly at the heart of our material world. Open source software has the power to change the whole course of technical development.

For once, at least some of the powerful players recognise the economic benefits of collaborative work. IBM has taken commercial software products for which it has paid substantial sums, and turned them into open source. The company has been wise enough to see that there is the potential for greater profit from the sale of supporting services in an environment where ideas are given free rein to advance software.

Perhaps it is the nature of cooperative development. If individual contributions are merged together to create better and better products, it is hard to identify figureheads to be designated the Agenda Setters. Yet the pace and viability of the whole IT business now depends on the success of open source in combating the stagnation that is liable to come in the wake of rigorous application of DRM principles.

I draw at least some comfort from the fact that Donald Knuth retains his position on the list. This is a fitting recognition for a man who thoroughly explored a huge range of basic software ideas and made them available for use by a whole generation of developers.