Proprietary software grew up, starting really in the 1980s, as an alternative and that became the dominant model with the rise of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and the like.
It's hard to make something as large as a government change. It's a little bit like building the transcontinental railroad.
I see publishers bemoaning their fate and saying that this is the end of publishing. No! Publishers will recreate themselves. Some of that comes from my experience as a print publisher.
I find that creative streak I think often leads in programmers to be good predictors of where culture as a whole is going to go. And that is where I think I've tried over the years to in some ways use my customers as a filter or a predictor of where technology as a whole is going to go. Or where the world as a whole is going to go.
If you are extremely well known and have a very desirable product, then yes, you probably do suffer a bit from piracy, in the same way that if you make a lot of money, you pay more in taxes than if you don't make any money.
A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.
