03 November 2006

Mixed Messages from Microsoft

Understandably everyone is jumping up and down about Microsoft's announcement that it will be working with Novell. But for me, the key phrase is the following from Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer:

We’re excited to work with Novell, whose strengths include its heritage as a mixed-source company.

Did you catch that? "Mixed-source" - it's clearly the Microsoft meme of the moment, as Microsoft tries yet again to get a grip on this spaghetti monster that is open source. In the past it's tried calling it "non-commercial" (as well as a few less complimentary things), and I predict that we're going to be hearing the phrase "mixed-source" quite alot - until they move on to something else.

Update: Here's a very shrewd analysis of what happened from Simon Phipps.

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