Microsoft Would Love to Hate Open Source

The recent news stories about Microsoft and Open Source represent, at face value, a very odd turn of events for Microsoft as only a couple of years ago they dismissed open source as anti competitive and even anti American. This change of heart seems to represent more a change in the perception of open source as a commercial proposition than a willingness of Microsoft to embrace the open source community. Over the last couple of years open source has gathered pace with many innovations now coming from the open source community. Microsoft is bound to get pretty worried about this as they seem pretty low on new ideas themselves given that Vista just seems to be a rehash of much of whats already available in the open source environment, put together with a bit of Microsoft polish and a lot of slick marketing. Ultimately the biggest threat to Microsoft is from open source as any commercial organization can not hope to compete with the vast number of developers writing open source, some of which having proved themselves to be the best and most creative around.

Microsoft's biggest problem is that they can't stop open source because they can't buy it or force it out of business. This is why Microsoft don't detail possible patent infringements because if they did the community would either invalidate the patents with evidence of prior art or change the offending applications to circumvent the patent. After what happened to SCO the last thing Microsoft wants is to declare war on the open source community.

IBM has a much better philosophy of co-existence, which has brought many rewards to both sides. Microsoft would do better follow this example I think.