Hi, I'm Ray Ozzie...
http://www.ozzie.net/blog/2002/08/10.html
Hi, I'm Ray Ozzie. We didn't make Groove cross platform because it would have slowed us down too much. So for that reason, and the incidental one that we'd like to be aquired by Microsoft, we've opted to forego the approval and support of developers who like to learn things by looking at source code and just focus on selling software.
It's hard to really quibble with the logic - it's one that a lot of Groove shareholders would approve of. But there's a defensive tone in the writeup, one shared by Joel in his "Why we toed the MS line" [link] and Dave W. with his weekly "Open-Source-is-not-the-boss-of-me" posts. They want to be admired and accepted by the massive number of OSS developers because the people doing work there are really good, and they write a lot in public. It's not just a shallow, I want my peers to like me sentiment either. There's a huge amount of 'leverage' (Ozzie's term) to be had by making your offering interesting to the enterprise class OSS types who write and share their code and thoughts in blogs, building mindshare and evangelizing in the process. It's not just the folks who write the software, either (the ones Dave Winer is obsessed with). The service firms who take the software the final 10% of the way from a crude to a polished final deliverable are worth impressing, because as system integrators they direct IT spending.
Sun struck a balance and made things just open enough, and pulled of the timing by launching just when the world was dying for an alternative to MS. The economics continue to challenge Sun.
MS is trying for the same balance. They're launching WebMatrix this week at Linux World, which is a strategic carbon copy of both Sun and IBM's open source IDE initiatives. They've tried to hook the academics on taking Rotor for a spin, and gone through the ECMA motions to convince people that they their work is interesting despite indeterminent threat of patent/legal action.
8:06:58 AM 
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