Or Maybe Microsoft Could Join the Community?

Update (22-May-2005): You can find a podcast of this entry here.
There's an eWeek article entitled "Microsoft Reachs Out to Open-Source Community". In it Brad Smith (Microsoft General Counsel) makes the following fabulous statement:

"We're going to have to figure out how we can bring the various parts of our industry closer together. Not necessarily in the sense of changing the way software is developed, but building bridges so that we all have the ability to collaborate with each other. And that will mean we will need some new rotations, I think, in how we work together, in how we license, in how we share technology or intellectual property rights with each other."

Pardon? The rest of us already are. You can too. Join business relevant open source communities. Start more of your own. The free and open source software communities have been figuring this out for a while now. So have your competitors at Sun, International Business Machines, Oracle, Novell, and SAP.

We could sit down and have yet another circular dialogue on patents. You'll point out intellectual property is important. (It is.) Various capital-C community spokespeople can point out that patents can get in the way of open source software projects. (They can.) And around it will go.

Or, you could DO something. It's not like there aren't enough people inside Microsoft that don't already know what to do.

Matt Asay asks that we give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt when they say they want to build bridges. The way one builds bridges in the community is to join the community. There are no barriers to entry. The open source projects aren't gated. Participate by a community's rules. Earn the respect of that community. Earn your reputation. You can even change the reputation you may already have. Your competitors did it. And they did so for very competitive reasons. So here are some fantasy projects to consider:

1. Join the Apache community.  Ensure Apache runs brilliantly on Windows. Improve the management of Apache in a Windows managed world. Make Windows the best managed environment for running Apache. And MySQL. And sendmail.
   
2. Join the Mono community. Ensure the Mono CLR runs better on UNIX to drive adoption of C#/CLR as a cross platform environment. Then deliver a better implementation of the ECMA specs on Windows so the richest web service delivery platform could be Windows. Contribute the Base Class Library code from Rotor directly to the Mono community as a real olive branch. Contribute the test harnesses from Rotor. Imagine the consternation on Novell's, Sun's, and IBM's faces when you do this.
3. Join the Eclipse community. Find out WHY so many people in the Eclipse world are working on Windows, and find out where the line between Visual Studio and Eclipse should be. By all means keep certain code clear of Eclipse (like performance enhanced compilers), but how many colour coded editors does the industry need?

Free and open source collaborative development communities represent what might be the best answer we've seen to date in our industry for software re-use. To buy versus build you could add "borrow" and "share" to your business tactics for product development and driving the business.  Source code is a valuable intellectual asset, but your software business — what you represent to your customers — is so much more than the source code. Come out and join the community.

Update: 5 May, 2005:  I found Dori's post via Scoble.  In it she makes the following point: 
"The fact of this business is that disruptive technologies happen, whether you like them to or not. If you create them yourself, you've got some control over how/when it happens. If you refuse to create them yourself, you have no one to blame but yourself when you become obsolete. It's the difference between good products and great products.

So Microsoft — go break something. Then you'll be interesting."

Dori's tackling the issue from a different perspective, but the point is same.  I've argued before that Microsoft has huge opportunities around open source as a disruptive business model.  This is conceivably what IBM is doing around Linux, smoothing the slope of their technology adoption life-cycle for AIX.

So Microsoft — go break something.  Join the community.