I’ve spent the past few years asking the software development community, ”Why can’t we all get along?”

I became increasingly optimistic after Microsoft’s General Counsel, Brad Smith, announced Microsoft’s intention to start improving relations. At ACT’s Intellectual Property & Technology Summit in 2005, he said that, "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.
Until Thursday, however, everything has come in the form of baby steps.

Not too long ago, the open source community and Microsoft sat on opposite sides of a demilitarized zone. Given the rhetoric, it wasn’t hard to understand the disconnect.

Richard Stallman launched the Free Software Movement with the fundamental belief that proprietary software is immoral and must be eradicated.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer famously referred to Linux as a cancer, something that must be cured.

Both are nothing more than hyperbole.

Sure, those few us who are prone toward hacking everything from our stereo equipment to our operating systems find proprietary software to be annoying. We would prefer to be able to open it up and get our hands dirty learning it, tweaking it and improving it. But, those minor annoyances have to be balanced against the great things we’ve gotten out of proprietary-based companies – levels of innovation that can only occur when companies can protect their innovations And just as important, there is a big difference between annoying and immoral. Proprietary software is no more immoral than Coca-Cola’s decision to keep its recipe a secret from the world and prevent me from reinventing New Coke.

In addition, the GPL does have viral components that make it tricky for proprietary or mixed source developers to work with if they want to protect their innovations. But, Linux is certainly not a cancer and the open source community has played an important role in advancing competition and innovation throughout the software industry. And companies like Tivo have found ways to work build new proprietary applications on top of GPL code.

In reality, the rhetoric on both sides created a much wider chasm than actually existed. Companies like IBM, Novell and Oracle have been straddling the fence between the two camps for years. Microsoft had been toying with the idea of open source through it Shared Source initiatives.

That makes the agreement between Microsoft and Novell that much more important. It is an enormous step. I don’t think I could sum up the importance of this agreement any better than CNET’s Charles Cooper

It boils down to this: The two companies will try to help the Linux and Windows worlds better interoperate, they will remove the potential legal liability that’s been hanging over the heads of noncommercial open-source developers like a cybersword of Damocles.

It’s a concession to reality and a reflection of maturing attitudes. Ballmer understands that many of his biggest customers operate in so-called mixed-computing environments with Linux and Windows applications. The days when a company like Microsoft could count on customer loyalty, as its lieutenants dismissed open source, are long gone.

The adults have come to the table and started moving the industry forward – together. But that does not mean that everyone will follow. Richard Stallman and the FSF remain committed to putting ideology before users, and have designed the GPLv3 to prevent this kind of cooperation in the future. The splintering this will ensure there will be some bumps along the road, but the future of the software industry is looking brighter today than it did two weeks ago.