By Justin Silverton

In a recent announcement from the samba team:

“In a letter to customers, Samba pointed out that one fundamental difference between Microsoft proprietary software and open source software was that the former divides and conquers with “coercive licensing agreements”.

The open source world, on the other hand, “encourages users to unite and share the benefits of the software.”

Samba said that the patent deal Microsoft and Novell jointly forged is “divisive”.

It parlays users depending on whether they are commercial or non commercial, and deals the cards differently - depending on whether the version of Linux came from Novell or from elsewhere”

This is an interesting perspective on the recent Microsoft/open source movement.  It didn’t really make any sense.  Microsoft, a company which stated in the past that open source was a virus was now supporting it financially through Novell.

Microsoft is taking a page right out of The Art of War.  They know they cannot defeat the open source community by using standard business practices (who are they going to buy out?) so they are doing the next best thing: let the community destroy itself. 

Because there are so many zealous linux users (including Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation), there will soon be different camps of users.  Users that support Microsoft’s version of linux and users that don’t.  It already seems to have started:  I have seen many users on various linux community message boards and mailinglists that will not use any version endorsed by Microsoft.

I guess we always have Hurd.