I'm writing this looking back from a potential future where microsoft becomes a consulting services company and its Windows OS is is the OS/2 of its day.  Microsoft failed to embrace the Open Source software movement.  Well not exactly.  Microsoft failed to research the make up of this group.  Not only the creators of OSS but the users of OSS.  The users are almost more importannt then the developers in this case.  Why?  MS decided that OSS was foolish and that the developers engaged in OSS where giving away their services and their time.  MS argued that software should be paid for and that developers should be making money.  I can't argue with any of this and on this point they are very correct.  However you have to look at the motivations of the OSS community. 
    The first perspective is the users.  They get free software without the worry of the licensing nightmare that accompanies most commercial software.  There is no good way to keep track of the software installed on most systems.  Don't get me wrong there are several improving ways of monitoring installed software but this is usually not free.  There is SMS and related products but this is still difficult, with many small to medium companies struggling to 1) understand their licensing agreements and 2) comply with their licensing agreements.  How do I know this?  I was employed by a small division of a VERY large corporation.  We had incredible resources but it was still a great challenge to manage all of the various MS and related software and all the third party software.  When you are told to install software on that laptop today because the boss is going out of town and needs it right now, you do it. 

            However as we move forward in time and major shift in development away from desktop and towards web applications began.  The two reasons for this were 1) DLL Hell, which is its own article/book/series of books on its own and the licensing debacle referenced above.  So we have a paradigm shift from desktop software to web software to alleviate the installation and maintenance nightmare of desktop software.  Note that we have had several paradigm shifts from the original main frames and UNIX boxes to the all powerful desktop to the client server heydays of the mid nineties and eventually to the web centric model that is emerging today. 

            Microsoft of course saw this and countered with .NET.  Make you think that .Net is all about the network and every server and desktop with .NET would be instantly connected and on the web.  Well here is reality: .NET did not ship with Windows XP.  Nor was it on the 2000 servers most people were using at the time.  But the worst was yet to come.  All of my client server apps written with VB6 and MSSQL would have to re written because VB.NET was not backward compatible with VB6.  Goodbye desktop hello web.  So VB6/COM training/talent/know-how goes to ASP and ASP.NET and then in ASP.NET vbscript is abandoned (rightfully or wrongfully) in favor of javascript.  So know I have wasted 5-6 years with VB and COM and must upgrade my skills.  So lets go looking for training for our staff. 

Wait a second.  What’s this java stuff.  That will really take off and that’s what all the big guys use on their servers and even better this language was written for the web and even better developers can fell like they are writing in C and feel smart while having the memory management of VB.  Yeah Java!  Then along comes .Net with C# the Java killer. 

All the while many free lance developer, student, academics, government and pretty much any software developer who has limited resources has been searching for ways to reduce software costs while remaining inside the boundaries of the law.  Well a few of them get together and figure some stuff out and write some programs to share.  Why not create this and why not create that and pretty soon you have an OS and a web server which is all your really need in this new world.  Why not have a few web languages?  Keep building on the foundations of what is currently available, get smart and hungry people to work on it and wait a while.  Pretty soon you have some pretty good tools written for smart people by smart people to do the things you need to do.  Bugs are fixed quickly, people are friendly this whole thing isn’t too bad. 

So all of a sudden OSS becomes to pretty decent software with a price that you can’t beat.  So the question is why pay for all that software especially when all you need is a web browser (available on Windows 98) to access all of the company network and software which is now web based.
...End of Part 1...Part 2 soon to come...