Are you sure about that? MS and Windows came about in a world with his attitude. If we had had a guild, would Windows have become the dominant desktop OS? Or

Are you sure about that? MS and Windows came about in a world with his attitude. If we had had a guild, would Windows have become the dominant desktop OS? Or would UNIX have persisted instead, and Linux never been invented (as a reaction to MS's dominance and the demise of UNIX)? Besides, isn't the argument here that a guild would enforce more conformity upon professional programmers? Linux wasn't made by professionals, in the beginning; it was made by a college student who then collaborated with other academics. A guild can't prevent that, any more than it can prevent people from buying copper pipe and fittings from Home Depot and fixing their own plumbing. And further, how long did it take before companies really started taking Linux seriously? It was ages before free and open-source software finally got (mostly) past the attitudes that hindered its adoption in corporations. I don't see how a guild would have changed this at all.