Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

I think there's considerable comfort to be taken from the existence of "consultants" with this little knowledge. Your competitors may be taking advice from such people right now, and how lucky for you if they are.

The miss-steps possible by following advice from such people are quite incredible in their scope. Their predecessors advised companies to stay out of Linux (here today, gone tomorrow they confidently asserted); before that to invest in AOL or MSN services not the "chaotic" Internet that would soon be relegated to a backwater. I'm sure it goes back to the dawn of time, bad advice justified by high prices.

On the assertion that "proprietary" is an ordinary language word which means "differentiated with a view to achieving competitive advantage" -- we should consider that ignorance is much more likely than malice. Most people have some very odd ideas about language, a great many people have eggcorns in their vocabulary well into adulthood for example. It's quite possible that Mr Gould has mistaken the definition of "proprietary" at some earlier juncture and now assumes the correct definition is really a very technical sense and his prior misunderstanding is the "usual" sense. This is no more serious an error than the recency illusion, although of course it discredits the author's opinions by showing that he doesn't check his facts.