Movement to the middle

David Berlind over  at Zdnet quotes Microsoft's open shared-source honcho Matusow on Microsoft's movement-to- the- middle strategy:

The difference for us is that we felt very strongly that we knew that parts of our strategy were not going to meet open source and what the whole world was going to call open source. So instead of getting into a semantactical battle every other day, call it shared source and say "Look, we re not going to make decisions every day that the open source community is going to agree with." And truth to tell is that's not the most important issue. What's most important is that customers are having their needs met, partners are having opportunity built to go and spin off new businesses and build a greater ecosystem around the windows technologies, academics can do the work that they want to do, hobbyists can get to the interesting technologies. That's what matters to me. Not whether I can call it open or not.

Like it or not but this is where giants will eventually move.  They will create an over-arching blueprint license (license will become an engagement strategy to control platform) to create an eco-system. Sun's CDDL and Microsoft's Shared-Source program is nothing but an attempt to lay the foundation for having their own say in the open source movement. It will be interesting to see how far they will succeed and how other big software vendors formulate their own "proprietary" open source strategy. 

It will require many lawyers and many creative marketing gurus to craft a compelling firewall around their current revenue stream.