When McKay Motshabi left the State Information Technology Agency for a government-facing position at Microsoft, he said something that will resonate for a long time: "There`s room for collaboration between the two camps of closed and open source software".

Not that he`s likely to take world peace into his job, but we thought it a good seed to sow, for others to nurture. Surely the crazy quilts that make up enterprise infrastructures means there`s a need for integration?

Jimi Lutz, development director at 3fifteen, a "Microsoft dev shop" in the Dimension Data stable, casts doubt on this: "Yes, if there were more traction for Linux in the enterprise, we might want to collaborate. But there isn`t. You get a lot of point applications, utilities and so on, on OSS, but no real common-language of standards-based development, for example in Web services.