In a Battle Royale match of epic proportions, Craig Mundie, Senior Vice President of Microsoft, squared off against Michael Tiemann, founder of Cygnus and CTO of Red Hat, at The Open Source Convention.
Mundie started the event with a picture of him as Dr. Evil (from the Austin Powers movies), which is how he believes he and Microsoft are often viewed in the Open Source community. "Microsoft has no beef with Open Source," he said. "Open Source isn't the issue."
What the issue is, he went on to say, is choice. Choice for the developers, and choice for the consumers. Mundie went on to say that Microsoft has chosen the commercial model, which is built on the business model, which helps the economy and community by creating lots of jobs and paying lots of taxes.
He said that Microsoft is learning from Open Source, by expanding communities and expanding source access ("Shared Source"). Shared Source is a way of providing source for customers to view, but significantly limiting the way in which they may use that code and the knowledge learned from it, in order to protect the owner's intellectual property value.
Michael Tiemann countered with a Latin phrase that translates "to be, rather than to seem." "Better to be open than to seem open, better to be trustworthy than to seem trustworthy." Tiemann discussed how Shared Source was merely an attempt to appease the forces pushing for openness, and said he looked forward to the day when Microsoft would embrace the GNU General Public License.
Following that, more people joined the ring. To Tiemann's aid came Clay Shirky, Brian Behlendorf, and Mitchell Baker. To Mundie's side jumped Ronald Johnston and David Stutz. The groups circled each other for awhile, throwing out jabs. Baker finally threw a folding chair at Mundie when she remarked, "Control of all our data flow by one entity is not healthy." The fight centered for awhile on issues of trust.
When Johnston came up with a flying kick about problems with the GPL, Tim O'Reilly, the referee, stopped the fight and declared it a draw.
