Ever since I crashed a 451 Group event at the Open Source Business Conference last year in their San Francisco offices, I have kept more than half an eye their 451 CAOS Theory blog. I figure if someone's provided me with a really good cheese plate at a meeting I wasn't invited to, the least I could do is read their stuff. It's just good karma.

Normally I find the missives from the 451 crew pretty insightful. But in Matthew Aslett's recent post, "Trouble in Paradise?" I find I have to take some exception. Matt. Dude. It was never paradise.

Aslett raises the alarm that lately there has been a significant rise in animosity between the open source community the open source business vendors. The Sun/MySQL kerfuffle and Matt Asay's recent misconstrued "free-riding" remarks were the examples Aslett specifically pointed to as real problems between the community and the commercial interests. I can cite other instances that could be lent to Aslett's thesis: the ongoing vitriol between the community and... Sun, Novell, and (depending on the day of the week) Canonical.

In this, I completely agree with Aslett: there's a lot of friction between the community and the vendors who are working with Linux and open source software. Where I diverge from his opinion is that this is anything new.

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