The Industry Standard addresses the sense of outrage over
Microsoft in the Open Source/Free Software communities and
concludes that part of the problem isn’t Microsoft — it’s
disappointment and rage over the fact that Open Source ended up not
being a business model after all:
“Since the open-source community went aboveground,
there’s been a battle between those wanting to change the world (at
least the world of software) and those who see open source as a
business opportunity. For the former, politics holds sway; the
others see only business problems and solutions. It’s disingenuous
for either side of the open-source crowd to wish Microsoft would
leave it alone, since so much of the good will open-sourceniks
enjoy emerged from the movement’s incessant cathedral-versus-bazaar
comparisons between its way of doing things and that of the ‘Evil
Empire.’ If Microsoft had real commercial competition in operating
systems or office applications, open source would be a marginal
theory, not a movement that has been adopted by the likes of
IBM.”
“Consortia like XML-RPC, which lets multiple operating
systems communicate clearly, hint at promising ways that closed and
open systems can interact. As advocates of the open language Perl
like to say, there’s more than one way of doing things. One of
those ways is for open-source businesses to accept the reality of
Microsoft’s dominance in some markets and provide interesting
solutions in areas Microsoft hasn’t yet considered. Empires tend to
fall apart at their edges, not their centers. Less complaining,
more coding. A company can’t ’embrace and extend’ your product if
it can’t keep up with you.”