Dana wrote an excellent piece over the weekend challenging Microsoft to compete with open-source products, and not with open source itself. This has what Microsoft has claimed to be doing for years, but the reality is that Steve Ballmer can’t seem to wrap his brain around open source, even when he tries to appear open or dismissive to or of it.
Microsoft should be looking to open source as an exceptional opportunity to extend the dominance of its Windows platform. Instead, it gets so mixed up as to whether it’s a platform or application or proprietary company that it fails to simply add open source to its arsenal. Dana writes:
Open source and Microsoft were never really enemies in the first place. Open source is a business model. Microsoft is a company. It’s like pitting a noun against a verb.
Microsoft is free to use the open source business model, or any model derived from it, like SaaS. Open source companies, in turn, are perfectly free to deliver proprietary extensions to open source products, as they regularly do under many licenses.
Entries (RSS)