Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, best known for its books O'Reilly books with the animals on their covers, has a more pragmatic view on open source than many of the open source fundamentalists. Tim has been giving a presentation on what he calls "the open source paradigm shift" for the past 2 years, and he has now found the time to write this down, asking for comments and review as in all good open source projects. Next year, it will be part of a book, surprisingly not published by O'Reilly but by MIT Press. In the excellent article at http://tim.oreilly.com/opensource/paradigmshift_0504.html, he explains the advantages and disadvantages of the paradigm shift, focusing on the "3 C's": commoditization, collaboration and customizability. That there is indeed a paradigm shift is also illustrated by the way Microsoft is now looking at open source: as Microsoft now gives away the source code for more and more tools, as well as for the Windows CE operating system. Now that is an enormous shift, probably not foreseen by the open source evangelists !