Bob Cringely foresees a decline in US market dominance because of reductions in basic research.

So what we have is less and less basic research. In time, this will lead to less research and development, and ultimately to fewer and poorer products. We're eating our seed corn. It may not show for a few more years, but the result of this behavior will eventually be a shift in global scientific power.

This is not a good thing.

Point taken -- but, a shift towards whom? Is anyone else doing the basic research that we are not, or are things tough all over?

Also, I think that Cringe misses a deeper point here. The big corps and the universities are struggling towards a free-market means of funding basic research; the former by tying it to market advantage, the latter by retaining property rights to the fruits of its labors. Aside from poor execution -- unavoidable when trying new organizational principles, and ultimately fixable -- what they're finding is that current intellectual property law is a poor fit.

This isn't exactly news. But if enough corporations and universities become dissatisfied enough with the current state of affairs, that kind of fiscal and intellectual clout can drive change, even a complete overhaul of the framework of intellectual property in the US.

What shape will that change take? Conventional wisdom says that corps will want to hold their intellectual property ever more tightly. But envy of others' portfolios may be a more potent driver than miserliness with their own. It's possible that some sort of IP-sharing scheme may emerge, something like an ASCAP for patents. It may even be made to work within the current legal framework, no slow-moving legislative or regulatory changes required.

My main concern is that there still be room for the non-commercial creator to work. Ideally, software patents should not exist at all. Alternatively, an ASCAP-style organization might make special provisions for non-commercial software. Given how many corporations use free software (Linux, BSD, Perl, Apache), I'd say the odds favor such an arrangement.