Reflecting on it, for the practitioner, I don’t think open source and closed source are different. As I mentioned in today’s follow up post, open source now-a-days is like breathing: it’s the normal state of things.

That said, there very much is are groups of people you can call “closed source thinkers” and “open source thinkers.” The catch is that the first group is just slower to realize how much things have already changed and how much more things are going to change. The shift is subtle to kool-aid drinkers like us, but my gut tells me that it’s going to be dramatic once it takes hold: like the move from a 56k dial-up to an always on broadband connection.

To put it another way, as you said, “[they] just hasn’t fully realised it yet.” That full realization will open all sorts of doors for change, and it’ll be fascinating to see who goes through which doors. For example, in an open source world, all your coders don’t need to work for the same company. Imagine how different things would be if MS Office was coded by MSFT’ers and non-MSFT’s alike. Or Vista. What if Linus was a core member of the Windows team?

Those kinds of things are just subtle mental shifts — “oh, all those people can be partners instead of enemies” — but they have big consequences. I’m dying for the day when “The Big Baddies” (from a pure OSS perspective, not mine) invite people like Fleury, Stallman, Linus, Miguel, &co. to come to their company and say to them, “OK, have at it. Here’s cash and people. Now what?”

There’s plenty — P-L-E-N-T-Y, plenty! — to be cynical about that line of thinking, but it’s a good pile of goo to start flinging around to see what sticks. And like you were saying about Ellison and Fleury, I’d *pay* to see that.