After reading through some of your comments in response to last week's post on Microsoft's apparently unholy alliance with Novell, I felt a bit as though I'd been dropped into an episode of "The Odd Couple." You know the plot: The finicky Felix gets into a tussle with the slovenly Oscar, who has somehow trampled on his roommate’s refined sensibilities. In the end, they snap out of their petty argument and realiz After reading through some of your comments in response to last week’s post on Microsoft’s apparently unholy alliance with Novell, I felt a bit as though I’d been dropped into an episode of “The Odd Couple.” You know the plot: The finicky Felix gets into a tussle with the slovenly Oscar, who has somehow trampled on his roommate’s refined sensibilities. In the end, they snap out of their petty argument and realize just how much they depend on one another.Will things work out equally well for two diametrically opposed open source camps? On the one hand, we have the Felix camp, which loathes the messy, unnatural blending of open and closed source vendors. To them, the idea that Microsoft could purposefully “inject” patent-encumbered technology into an open source project where it could be unknowingly distributed and modified and redistributed is absolutely abhorrent. The Oscar camp, on the other hand, understands that risk but welcomes the opportunities that accompany a mess like the Microsoft/Novell partnership that intends to port Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in to Linux.As for me, I’m squarely in the Oscar camp, though I maintain a very orderly sock drawer. As in nature, inside the Beltway, and on Survivor, a strange alliance is usually behind success. Same for closed and open source vendors. If you don’t believe me, consider a recent example — which went beyond partnership to an actual acquisition. Earlier this year, middleware vendor Iona (of CORBA fame) acquired the well regarded open source firm LogicBlaze. In the deal, Iona gobbled up the company’s IP and technology as well as its three founders, Hiram Chirino, Rob Davies, and James Strachan, who were contributors to a number of very high-profile open source projects including Apache ActiveMQ and Apache ServiceMix. The deal gave Iona the chance to seriously influence these projects, which have yielded technology that Iona employs in its Celtix open source ESB (now called Fuse ESB).What was Iona’s “real” intention with this deal? Did it mean to cripple these projects? More likely, their selfish intent was to create an open source ESB capable of matching and perhaps besting solutions from MuleSource, Red Hat, and WSO2. To do that, Iona will need to ensure the success of ServiceMix. Plain and simple. And that’s exactly what has happened since the acquisition in May. LogicBlaze’s founders are still very active with and supportive of their pet open source projects, all while moving Iona’s product line forward. You can read more on the blogs maintained by Hiram, Rob and James.One other unholy but wholly beneficial closed/open source partnerships to consider in this light include Red Hat’s work with Exadel. Since partnering in March, Exadel has open sourced its development tools through Red Hat’s JBoss.org community. And Red Hat expects to ship Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 under GPL v2 any day now, using the Exadel software. That’s enough to make Felix and Oscar sit up and take notice. Of course, who knows what evil lurks in the heart of any corporation? But one thing is for sure: If there are no unselfish acts, then both parties in any acquisition or partnership are in it for themselves and their respective communities. So give a hand to Harold and Maude, Felix and Oscar, Gilligan and Skipper, Archie Bunker and Meathead. They may seem at odds, but at the end of the day (or episode) they’ll show you the power of co-opetition. Open Source