Distributed Mind

This is kind of fun: Scoble, the guy I wrote a post about the other day made a post about an article Chris Pratley, a guy at Microsoft, who had made a post about patents and open source. Most readers picked up on the open source part and spent many, many long posts arguing about it. I argues Pratley had missed the point with open source (see my first comment on Scoble's site), but I think originally I overestimated to the extent that he did so. The really fun part though, is that Pratley actually wrote a repsonse, showing some surprise (ah, such naivete) which responded to some of the arguments including mine (he actually responded to several of my points - I feel so special). At first I though Pratley was just another MS drone (I know MS has some good people, but they also have some, well, drones), but he definitely impressed me with his calm and reasoned response, showing that both I missed the boat a little, and that he hadn't missed it as much as I had thought. It was an interesting look inside of an MSer's head though. His most recent post makes it clear he isn't really all that interested in continuing the discussion though, so I don't think we will see any more on this particular topic. I hope that it caused him to give a few extra moments thought to the advantages of open source, though (even though he already knows plenty of those).