TCSDaily today has my piece on the Microsoft-Novell deal. Gist: For Microsoft, it's simple; pay attention to the customers. For the open source movement, it is a lot more complicated, because, "People talk about 'the open source community' as if such a thing existed. The reality is more complex. Many different tribes and sub-tribes graze this ground" and, "The philosophies and interests of these groups are not entirely congruent."

Behind the negative reaction of some of the open source tribes:

Microsoft may not want to destroy the open source movement, but the open source movement, at least as embodied in FSF [Free Software Foundation], certainly wants to destroy Microsoft, as a step toward its ambition of eradicating property rights in software, root and branch, not to mention rights in other forms of content.

It is crucial to remember that the basic orientation of Microsoft is quite different from that of the most vocal open source tribes:

Microsoft is a proudly commercial enterprise, subordinating the desires of its coders to the exigencies of the market and the demands of the customers. In contrast, the creation myth of the open source movement is that programmers write for each other, not for the customers. The corporate customers that adopt open source software are being allowed to free ride on the coders' work, and they should be grateful, not uppity and demanding. The justification of the Microsoft-Novell deal that "the customers want it" cuts no ice with open source purists.

However, this justification does carry weight with corporate supporters of open source, such as IBM, HP, Sun, Dell. So they have an interesting problem in how to placate their corporate clientele and the open source extremists, at the same time. (If they figure it out, maybe they should be sent to the Middle East next.)

posted by James DeLong @ 8:40 AM | Free Culture Movement, Patents, Software

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