Dana Blakenhorn has run a couple of insightful short essays on the need for consensus in industry and greed's role in breaking (or at least stifling) consensus. Novell, with its ambition to distinguish its product, has chosen to snub the consensus that Linux requires open APIs. Instead, Novell chose to pay Microsoft its 'tax money', despite the fact that the EU decalred this irrational and anticompetitive.

There is a nice analogy in politics as well, and its even involves the environment, just like the business landscape.

The same weapons used by Microsoft against open source are being deployed by politicians, businesses and interest groups against the demands of consensus on policy. Thus it is that computing, business, economics and politics share a single inconvenient truth.

Novell encourages an indutry where every startup will have to pay for the right to communicate with other pieces of software. It is not only dangerous to a free and capitalist market. It is also extremely harmful to innovation.