John Dragoon, Novell’s Chief Marketing Officer, walks an interesting path. I first noticed his comments back when he took a swipe at Canonical while praising Microsoft’s kernel “contributions”.

Recently, he had an article in Forbes, “Battle Of The OS Titans“, where he lays out an argument that operating system development is different now-a-days and that we are “all going to be winners” in the new “OS wars”.

The Forbes article is worth a read, I suppose, if only to gain insight on how a Novell executive is framing what he sees. I don’t think the article holds up under inspection, but that’s not really what this is about.

What this is about is an additional blog posting Mr. Dragoon made, “The Operating System Battle Heats Up“, where he goes just a tiny bit further and states: “While the winner on the vendor side is far from clear, it seems obvious that the consumer will win no matter what the outcome.”

This is foolish. The “consumer” – why not the “user”, I wonder? – will not win “no matter the outcome”, because the “consumer” has been losing continuously under proprietary software offerings. In fact, it is only the recent increase in “wins” from Free and Open Source Software that has in turn forced Closed and Proprietary Software to change that has led to wider consumer wins.

The so-called “new OS War” exists because the “consumer” was tired of losing as Closed and Proprietary Software “won”.

Firefox takes market share from Internet Explorer, so Microsoft has no choice but to re-assemble the Internet Explorer team and be more responsive to pesky things like standards and user demand. Linux makes inroads in mobile devices and prices come down. These are “consumer wins” because they are FLOSS wins.

Same thing with any application area you choose to examine: if there is a strong FLOSS alternative, it continues to grow, and Closed alternatives scramble to become more “open”. If there is no strong FLOSS alternative, there is no change.

Customers only win if FLOSS wins, because only FLOSS offers customers freedom, openess, and the ability to use, change and distribute software as they see fit.

There may be a small and short-term side effect “win” through the competitive pressure where closed vendors drop prices, pretend to be “open”, or other such marketing trickery, but if Closed Source were to continue to win, and FLOSS continue to lose, we would surely begin to move back to the bad-old-days that most of us have no interest in re-visiting.