[via eWeek.com]

Open Source approach and Microsoft, there are links, have a look!

A commercial company has to build intellectual property, while the GPL, by its very nature, does not allow intellectual property to be built, making the two approaches fundamentally incompatible […].

Licenses like the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and commercial software, on the other hand, are quite compatible with one another […].

“One of the things I have learned is that engineers who work on commercial software really can’t work on open source on GPL and engineers who work on GPL can’t work on commercial software. You really have to separate the two”.

Asked what Microsoft had learned from the open-source community and what it could still learn, he said the development methodologies are very interesting, and in fact Microsoft has made community development process a standard part of its process.

“There were definite learnings for us on that. Open source was way ahead of us on that five years ago and we have learned from them. This whole thing where Microsoft is an open blog environment is about us trying to really embrace these existing trends that are very important in the industry and to being open to our communities across all of our products. Fascinating things happen there. That model is the way of the future and we’re embracing it”.