After reading through some of your comments in response to last
week's post on Microsoft's apparently unholy alliance with Novell, I felt a bit as though I'd been dropped into an episode of "The Odd Couple." You know the plot: The finicky Felix gets into a tussle with the slovenly Oscar, who has somehow trampled on his roommate’s refined sensibilities. In the end, they snap out of their petty argument and realize just how much they depend on one another.

Will things work out equally well for two diametrically opposed open source camps? On the one hand, we have the Felix camp, which loathes the messy, unnatural blending of open and closed source vendors. To them, the idea that Microsoft could purposefully "inject" patent-encumbered technology into an open source project where it could be unknowingly distributed and modified and redistributed is absolutely abhorrent. The Oscar camp, on the other hand, understands that risk but welcomes the opportunities that accompany a mess like the Microsoft/Novell partnership that intends to port Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in to Linux.

As for me, I'm squarely in the Oscar camp.

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