Last week, Mary Jo Foley offered commentary on Microsoft's open source software strategy with respect to independent software vendors based on an interview with Microsoft's Sam Ramji. Matt Asay provides good colour commentary on his blog. Each post focuses on the trustworthiness and competitive history of the company. Let's look at things from a different perspective.

Matt Asay thinks (and has thought for some time) that the Macintosh is the best place to do open-source development. And he points out that he's not alone in this opinion. (And here's another post along the same lines.)

I was pleasantly surprised to read that Larry Augustin had been named SugarCRM's full-time CEO. After spending much of the last decade as an investor and board member extraordinaire for many (most?) companies grouped in the commercial open source category, it is good to see Larry back in the CEO saddle. This is a vindication of sorts for Larry and his vision of an open source future.

Maybe it’s a coincidence but this week has seen evidence of tension between commercial open source vendors and elements of the open source user community. Matt Asay stirred up something of a hornet’s nest with his post questioning how open source vendors can find ways of encouraging users to contribute either code of cash in return for free software

IBM made a slew of announcements and predictions on open source topics at this week's LinuxWorld conference, but one of the least talked about and written about announcements was this one (Matt Asay did single it out). IBM released its HPC Open Software Stack as open source, aiming at cheaper-to-deploy, simpler supercomputers.

One of the challenges open source companies have is that you serve two distinct markets: your customers as well as non-paying community users. Paradoxically, the non-paying users can be the most vocal and demanding.

This post from Matt Asay on whether open source needs consolidation asks an interesting question, and some of the comments that came in on it were interesting. This comment caught my eye: "No. Open source does not need consolidation. Open source needs product managers."

On their blogs, Matt Asay and Savio Rodrigues are discussing whether IBM is using open source to diminish competitor margins. I think it is obvious that IBM does this, most notably with its Linux engagement, which is squarely directed against Microsoft (Windows). It is what I call a war over the share of customer’s wallet, and open source plays a major role. The graph below shows how it works.

Matt Asay set the cat amongst the pigeons late last week with his post declaring that “Free software has lost. Open source has won." To my mind, there is actually a lot to agree with in Matt’s post but where it falls down is in its generalisation of the Free Software movement.