It's not every day that you see a Microsoft employee demonstrating Microsoft software running natively on Linux. Yet that's exactly what happened at AJAXWorld here, as Brad Abrams, group program manager at Microsoft for ASP.NET AJAX (codenamed Atlas) did today.
During a morning keynote, Abrams declared that Microsoft is not the cathedral and that open source isn't really a bazaar when it comes to AJAX, a claim that undermines one of the core underpinnings of the open source movement.
In 1999, Eric S. Raymond published The Cathedral & the Bazaar, a seminal tome on the open source movement. Among open source's many core tenants the book highlighted is that proprietary vendors such as Microsoft are closed, monolithic structures – the cathedral -- while open source operates in bazaar fashion where things are all done out in the open and with the community.