I believe the article is too long for the Speakup list, so here's just a taste and the URL for the rest: Behind Microsofts Settlement with Sun? The Power of the Open-Source Movement What matters now is not where a technology comes from but how it works with everything else. By David Kirkpatrick FORTUNE Magazine Tuesday, April 6, 2004 http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,608663,00.html Once the shock of seeing Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy happily together on the same stage had passed, the world of tech punditry last Friday turned to the question, What does Microsofts settlement with Sun mean? Though many aspects of the deal remain murky, lets speculate anyway. Driving the peace settlement, it seems to me, is an awareness that we are all moving from a world of centralized proprietary technologies into one of distributed power in computing. Sun and Microsoft are nervously seeking to position themselves for the new reality, with which they are both profoundly uncomfortable. The technology industry is starting to mirror the Internet on which it thrives and functionsit is more and more distributed, global, and centerless. The most obvious example of how technology, innovation, and business power are becoming distributed is the open-source software movement. Open sources influence is far greater than its current market share in software might suggest. The open-source model increasingly defines whats possible in technology. What matters now is not where a technology comes from but how it works with everything else. Open-source software can be made to play well with others more readily than any technology weve ever seen. Even more than its low price, thats why companies like it so muchthey can modify its guts to their specific requirements. So what are Sun and Microsoft doing? Despite their longstanding differences, both companies come from the same older world of proprietary technology and centralized control. They just represent different wings of the same movement. It benefits them both to put their differences behind them for several reasons. For one thing, as executives said in interviews, customers want things to work together. One might also read that as: customers want our stuff to be more like open source. In any case, it behooves Sun and Microsoft to at least make it easier for people to use their respective software in tandem. That much interoperability they can offer by working together. And it also benefits both companies to stop wasting their energies focusing so much animosity on one another when they really need to be figuring out how to deal with the much larger issueopen source and distributed technology generally. Microsoft and Sun are really uniting against a common enemy. This is how one should read the interesting quote in Mondays Wall Street Journal from Microsoft executive Hank Vigil, who says that working together is "beneficial to both of us relative to other choices." [remainder removed] -- Janina Sajka, Director Technology Research and Development Governmental Relations Group American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Email: janina at afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175
