I'm a wee bit tired by patent FUD and other substitutes for real competition from Microsoft. Microsoft has built a great business on comparatively good products. Yet in its old age, it seems incapable of competing on customer value and instead keeps fetishing its patent portfolio, as if anyone but its lawyers care about those.

"THE VOLE is submitting its Shared Source licences to the Open Souce Initiative for certification, as announced in a keynote speech by Bill Hilf, Microsoft General Manager of Platform Strategy, on July 26 at the OSCON Open Source Convention held last week in Portland, Oregon."

In-fighting within the open source community needs to stop or risk further alienating companies, attendees at the Cape IT Initiative's (CITI) FOSS event heard last week.

I remain frustrated by the complete lack of marketing and business sense that many open source companies continue to display. I thought that we were past the whole foolishness of competing in the ghetto amongst ourselves vs. the big proprietary guys with lots of dough but it seems that the argument has just started taking other forms.