“The following commentary was written in response to Eric
Raymond’s article Microsoft is
right.”
“This has been a fascinating case to watch. People, Eric
included, rightly point out that AOL is not playing fair on this
count, and playing fair is part of what going Open Source/open
standards is all about. Interesting as this is, it misses the
larger point (as a side note: Microsoft is hardly playing fair here
either; today’s news details how Microsoft has built code into
their messaging client to disable other messaging clients on the
same machine).”
“AOL should change their tune. But they shouldn’t do it out of a
sense of fairness. They should do it because it makes good business
sense. One of the major business gambits in Open Source is this:
hope that having a smaller slice of a larger pie leads to more
revenue than having a larger slice of a smaller pie. This is why,
for example, Bob Young proclaims that growing Linux market share is
more important than growing Red Hat’s dominance within the Linux
market. CheapBytes, Walnut Creek, and all the other Red Hat clone
vendors are growing Linux market share faster than Red Hat could
alone, and if Red Hat takes a smaller percentage of the Linux
market it is nonetheless a much bigger market.”