Even though my initial call to look at restructuring capitalism has yet to produce many responses, I feel it is time I show you some ways that what I have suggested in "GLM's Road Map OR Bulding a Brand Corporation as a Social Experiment" has been done in limited scope before.

Hopefully by doing this I will help people make more sense of my original post. And as always, I welcome all feedback as long as its largely constructive.

But before I get into the meat, here's a couple of my more 'poetic' writings on this topic. Skip ahead if you wish.

Humanity's stunning significance ...the only true thing that seems to separate ourselves from other animals is art.

But what art is there today? The one, true, and sometimes mysterious art today is that of a sales person.

Pitch me this new camcorder

This new video game system

This new media player.

What else do I need for it to work best? Oh, sure, I'll take the extended warranty.

We are a culture that thrives on creating "finger-paintings" for each other to buy in one form or another.

If you don't act in the movie or sing on the album, you work on the production team, or buy the star coffee.

If nothing else, you buy the media and help make more media. Or buy the media player.

At the dawn of this golden age of digitality,

There is a chain creating our economics.

And at the very top is something we hold too dear.

Intellectual Property rights.

Copy rights.

And every other right you can think of.

The product, the method, the manufacturing tools..these are chump change.

We build our world on ideas,

Funded on dreams and paid for with cash.

Recently I've been noticing a lot of things going on in various media. People around the world are rediscovering the use of bartering and trading, of coming together to benefit each other.

There are, however, some wide examples today that gives us inspiration to try and follow this behavior. In this article I will point out two, but I know there are many more.

During the time before the rise of the world wide web most people associated the word 'web' with something you use a broom to take care of. In the dawn of this era there existed a little known company called Netscape.

Netscape's early efforts were to build upon the original, most popular web browser entitled Mosaic. The technology first coded by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina can still be found in not only FireFox but also Internet Explorer.

Netscape originally had no direct competition, until a little operating system from a mediocre company came along. Windows 95 introduced a cheap graphical user interface for IBM compatibles, and as many of us know, lead to Microsoft's domination in the personal computer field only until a few years ago.

Internet Explorer quickly established dominance because every computer that shipped with Windows shipped with Microsoft's browser. Because Microsoft leveraged their monopoly position they effectively killed Netscape's business model, leaving it so roughed up AOL-Time Warner (if you're familiar with this dealing, you'll see it as the blind leading the blind..) decided it needed help.

AOL's actual reason for acquiring Netscape was so it wouldn't have to pay lisencing fees to include Internet Explorer in its codebase for the America Online Application.

In 1998 the Netscape company announced it would be releasing its source code for Netscape v.5 as "open source." This meant that anyone and everyone who wanted to cooperate and create new applications based on the aging Netscape (and much of the underlying code of Internet Explorer) foundations was free to legally do so.

Jump from then to 2002's beta releases of Phoenix (the precursor to Firefox) saw a very stable browser that blew many away. I remember myself downloading new builds almost every other day!

Today Firefox has become the de facto web browser, pushing Internet Explorer down to a puny 25% of the market. The Mozilla corporation that was launched under the basis of sharing the code base has become massive, and has branched into several different categories of products. From an e-mail client to a software bug reporting service, their evolution is still ongoing.

Even today their software remains not only free, but freely modifiable for any purpose if you release it under the same licence its been put under.

Many of you may have heard of this mythical "Linux" operating system. I realize many of you are not ardent computer users or geeks, so I'm going to try and break this down as easily to understand as possible. In fact, I don't really need to get into the technical bits and bobs to help you understand the miracle of GNU/Linux.

In the early days of the computer revolution, hobbyists often gathered to get their nerd on and show off what they had been tinkering with in their unkempt lairs of electronic debauchery. In this pre-dawn of the networked age people were used to sharing their discoveries and delighted at picking each others brains. Most of the technology at your fingertips in your beige/black/whatever colored box is the byproduct of many years of someone else's work.

One may ask themselves, then, at this junction: "Why is computer software expensive at times, why are we buying this software?"

Capitalism at its finest.

Richard Stallman created the GNU project in 1983, his goal was to design and implement a Unix-like operating system (think Mac OS X) with the intent to copyleft it. While Stallman felt that it was ultimately the person who created the software's right to charge for it, he felt that the idea of writing a computer program and locking it up so no one can view how it worked or modify it was morally reprehensible.

Throughout the eighties Richard Stallman with the help of many other programmers around the world had created the foundations for a useful collection of programs to run a computer. They just hadn't gotten around to making a little pesky thing called a kernel.

Not to make your eyes glaze over, an operating system kernel is found on every machine that runs. Windows has one, Linux has one, Mac OS X has one, ad infinium. You may never realize its there, and that's really the way its designed. The only job a kernel has is to act as a go-between for resources. It talks to both all the physical pieces in your box, and also to the software that you run. Without it a computer would effectively be close to useless.

Even to this day, the GNU project lacks a stable "kernel." However, in 1991 a Finnish college student by the name of Linus Torvalds was saddened that the options available to him to have a "Unix-like" computer in his dorm room were either expensive or quite limited.

Plugging away for hours and hours at creating the basis of an operating system, Linux kernel version .01 was released widely across a user network and he invited everyone to openly download it, play with it, modify it, and all that fun stuff programmers like to do.

By December 1992 version 0.12 had hit the Internet and Linus officially announced that the Linux kernel would be placed under the GPL, or GNU Public Licence. People continued to port applications created by and for GNU/The Free Software Foundation and make Linux a fully featured and functional operating system, rivaling Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Mac OS. In fact, most computers that "serve" you web pages are either running Linux, or at the very least, an open source piece of software called Apache.

Now, today, in 2009, I'm writing this article ON a Linux-based system running GNU software (and using Firefox for my web browser!).

Ain't getting together and accomplishing things FUN?

As you can see between these two brief examples I have shown you people around the world with the right tools and inspiration can create things for others to enjoy and utilize.

It is not at all a misnomer to call the United States Federal Reserve backed note virtual currency. It has value because a consortium of quasi-public private banks tell us it does. But when you want to have it backed up by something tangible, it falls short.

Just like a lot of stock market manipulation and stock speculation.

Throughout my lengthy discourse on looking at capitalism's fundamentals, its failings and successes, I have sprinkled in much of my own personal philosophy.

However, its not really my own philosophy. Its a philosophy that has been spoken by many before, and it shall be spoken by many again.

I thank Richard Stallman, the GNU/Linux consortium, and the people behind the Creative Commons to show us how some of "my" ideas may work.

In a future article, I will show you even more of these ideas at work, and hopefully get around to detailing these types of actions away from technology. I understand many of you may not quite grasp some of the significance because I seem to be bantering on about computers all day.

But consider this: what is greed? Is greed the undying notion of having it all, wanting it all, getting it all?

Or can greed be something as simple as coming up with a great idea and locking it up, leaving yourself and your lineage the only benefactor?

I believe, like Richard Stallman, that its morally irresponsible to create reams of laws and intellectual property documents. Conversely, also, I believe that whoever invents a useful tool has the right to charge for it.

But..how shall it be paid for?

With cash? With sweat? With devotion? With stock options?

The only real investment capital is the human spirit and the drive to get something accomplished.