Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Dogs and Cats Living Together!

Well this is a welcome change. It appears that Microsoft after an initial reaction of toxic shock to the open source community is beginning to learn to live with it. That's good because the open source community has been around for years and isn't going anywhere.

This accomodation is to be expected and in a way is quite telling. When LAMP first appeared on the Microsoft radar the initial reaction was to spread as much FUD as possible about the free software movement as possible. This resulted in the cancer comment and numerous other child like attacks. When the that didn't really work MS tried their more subtle, yet still wrong approach, the "Get the Facts Campaign" in 2003 . This also appeared to fail in the market as many of the facts were less than factual. MS has got to realize when the users experience tells them something completely different than a Microsoft test, they are going to believe their own eyes.

One thing the dot com boom did was create a huge number of developers familar with the LAMP stack. These developers have been using using this software for years now and are quite familar with it's capabilities. In many regards the dot com crash will help with the long term acceptance of the LAMP stack. Many of these developers either had to find jobs in the corporate world or if they were lucky enough they walked out of the Dot Com crash with some cash. As the developers who were part of the Revolution OS continue moving up the corporate ladder, further acceptance of the LAMP stack is going to continue.