"gapingvoid got it wrong"

open, closed, Microsoft, Sun – it doesn’t matter. _Software has no value_ (nod to eric raymond). What has value is the people, companies, and support behind the software. If software had value, then upgrades and new versions wouldn’t replace prior versions. Mac OS 9 anyone? Windows 98?
Apache/Linux/MySQL – great support and people involved – high value. Sharepoint 2007 and .Net, again great support and people involved – high value. When I write code for someone they are buying me, not the code. I’m the one that brings the value.
At $125/hr.

“Technological Atheism”, eh? You can tell when Redmond is really losing badly, because it’s the only time they begin advocating for a level playing field, portability and the marketplace of ideas. You didn’t hear anything about an “Office Open XML” until Open Document Format started gaining mindshare traction.
And remember when their counterargument to Java’s “platform independence” became that silly .Net “language independence” riff?
re: Micheal’s “When I write code for someone they are buying me, not the code”…
Let’s bear in mind that they *aren’t* buying you. At $125/hr, they are only renting you. When the engagement is over, you’ll be gone, and what they’ll have is the code…along with whatever inherent engineering limitations it has. Of course, if the engagement is perpetual, that won’t ever come up…if you’re immortal. 😉
(This reminds me of those taglines you used to hear on ads for DVD movies: “Die Hard XVIII: Own it today!” What a lie. After the sale, you don’t *own* the movie, you’ve just bought a licence to view it in a very restricted set of circumstances including audience size and geographic regions. Don’t even *think* about moving it to a different technology platform. That’s why we don’t hear those taglines anymore.)

On the one hand it’s nice to hear all this pragmatism coming out of Redmond instead of the old smears an name-calling, but this doesn’t paint an accurate picture of reality either.
There is a war.
Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Open Source is about Freedom. Microsoft is about total control and ownership. Microsoft’s ownership. The fact that both sides are willing to compromise, cooperate and learn from each other to get things done that need to be done *now* doesn’t mean the long term conflict has gone away.
(The “software has no value” post is extremely ironic in this context. Placing value on it, turning the software and the knowledge behind it into economic property and then restricting its use, thereby limiting the people that could add the real value is exactly what closed source companies like Microsoft do.)