Death of a Dialectic
Cliff Reeves mentions the strangeness of advocating for the power of the Open Source approach while working at Microsoft. I agree that this is a nonsensical dialectic whose time has come and gone. Even Ballmer was quoted recently saying "We don't compete with movements." The common sense has been to take the Windows vs. Linux competition and turn that into an all-out "us vs. them" situation - both within Microsoft and the Open Source community.
Open Source is a perfectly valid - and frankly brilliant - model for developing software. In an odd way, it's a combination of Friedmans' Flat Earth and Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds", bringing together a highly intelligent, globally distributed self-organizing community that gets smarter the more challenges are thrown at it. More on this in the future.
The point for this post is that people are still shouting but thousands of servers running Windows are hosting Apache, MySQL, PHP, Ruby, and hundreds of SourceForge applications - so it may be time to think about how OSS and MS can be less like oil and water and more like peanut butter and chocolate.
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