Marshall Phelps

Written by insiders and "should" tell the story about how Microsoft opened up to collaborate with others. Rather than an insider story, it feels a bit more like a rehash of press releases and the details of the time. Doesn't seem very good at providing many insights

Could really have been boiled down to about five pages saying that patents are no longer just tools for suing people and scaring them, but trading cards in cross-licensing deals. Also that corporations are using hybrid proprietary and open systems (to cut costs, balance their dependence) so a certain degree of coexistence is inevitable. The rest is PR.

An informative discussion of open source vs proprietary software and the future relationships between them. The comparison of IBM, Novell and other cultures with Microsoft was particularly interesting.