A recent article caught my eye and turned it a nice shade of red. It discussed the — hardly new — idea that the future of software usage must involve a mixture of free and proprietary products — something the writer refers to as “mixed source”. The piece was entitled “Mixed source - the best of both worlds” which may give you a clue as to where I disagree with it.

The article was an opinion piece by Steve Harris, senior director for open source products at Novell in issue 78 of Linux User & Developer magazine. Sadly it’s not yet available on-line and I don’t honestly know if it will be. If it is I’ll post a comment with a link here so you can read it for yourself.

Microsoft turn to free software? That’ll be the day. Some have suggested that Microsoft might embrace free software and thus resolve the present conflict. That actually would be a terrific strategy for them, but I don’t think that Microsoft is smart enough to do it.

Robin Miller recently published a story on Newsforge about “Stan”[1], as an example of a situation that demonstrates proprietary software is a danger to business continuity. I found this story interesting since I think Mr. Miller came close to correctly identifying a core issue, which is that the proprietary software business model as it exists today both facilitates and encourages vendors to act in bad faith. However, it did not need to have been this way, and really comes down to misuse of licensing along with some deliberate abuse and exploitation of existing commercial law.