Microsoft and speciation

Following Jonathan Schwartz's keynote at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco this morning, Bill Hilf, Microsoft director of platform technology strategy, gave a presentation about coopetition, or how to best to live in a Microsoft world. He offered kumbaya bullet points such as "patience is key," "learn what you can handle," and "invest in people smarter than you." He also talked about communities (Microsoft has a big one, but not open source) and lizard species that evolve in different environments--speciation.

I guess that SugarCRM and Microsoft collaborating is a form of speciation. The open source CRM product grew up in the open source world (with a bit of proprietary code in the commercial version) and about 35 percent of customers run on Windows servers. It can live in an open source environment like LAMP or adapt to Microsoft's more proprietary world by getting access to some of the source code and running under the Microsoft Community License, the company's open source flavor. It's all Darwinian...