age of participation

"the information age is over" this is what sun microsystems ceo scott mcnealy declared before announcing that he will be giving away their software technology for free. wow! this is the solaris operating system we're talking about here. back when i was on bt in tamagawa, that's a whole eon of light years ago, our workstation has dozens of sun blade servers which cost around US $2000. open sourcing solaris could lead to a lot things like the evolution of patches to make it work on intel x86 machines like the soon to be released version of mac os. this could lower production costs for software people who are depending on solaris systems, but on the other hand one can't help but ask: what happens to the people behind solaris? will they lose their jobs? what about microsoft, do they have plans of at least slashing their current software prices to half so as to prevent piracy? speaking of microsoft, i heard from a twit podcast that they are having brain drain problems. the top people have opted to resign and join other companies, i should start updating my resume. haha! yeah right