Tom's comparison between his own commercializing plan post versus Jono Bacon's OpenOffice article strikes me as a perfect example of the two languages that are being spoken these days.
Essentially, Tom says: "the freedom to use, study, improve, and share source code", and then goes on to "The intractability of the stack means that the hard won software freedoms which apply to its source code apply more "on paper" than in practice" , finally proposing to "advance software freedoms, take a worthwhile leadership role in determining the future of personal computing, and earn a profit".
In contrast, Jono goes on about "the responsibility for the suite to help the push to Open Source", "marketing", and "software blessed by the Open Source methodology".
Tom describes the article's plead for more developers and shorter release cycle as "rearranging the deck chairs". From the point of view of Tom's post, it surely is; on the other hand, from the point of view of Jono's article, Tom's post is trying to solve a solved problem.
Maybe I'm still under the effect of dinner with RMS, but this sounds to me like one of those Free Software vs. Open Source things.
So, we believe in these fredoms. We are not interested in software that doesn't give us these freedoms. We have reached the "first base" in our goals; we have a complete, usable environment which can be used for our daily activities. Now we need to improve it significantly, and reintroduce innovation (there is a lot of innovation in Free Software, but 99% of the time, it's just catching up with non-free software; the innovation either "doesn't catch", or only "catches" after being copied and modified by non-free software).
On the other hand, we also need money to live.
So how can we go about doing those things, while still making a living, and that without compromising our beliefs?
So, we have this really cool model for developing software, which is more cost-effective and may result in more reliable software. We have reached the "first base" in our goals, in that we made our model known and trendy; open source software is a serious contender in the server market, and many companies are open-sourcing their products to reap the benefits we claim to exist.
Now what we need to do is get it on the desktop too, so that we can get more market share. Of course, in order to do that, it's essential to be able to interoperate with closed-source software, specially run on closed-source platforms.
So basically, we need to convince everyone who is profiting from this to give some contribution.
We measure success - depending on who you ask - by either the number of people using open-source, or by the revenues of companies/projects based on it, or by how much money is saved thanks to it.
We measure success in different ways. The success of a tool is measured by its quality (doesn't matter if it has three users in the whole world). The success of the toolchain is measured by our ability to get on with our lives without requiring non-free software. The success of the "movement" is measured by the awareness of people about the software freedoms.
The problem here is, while the goals are to some extent incompatible, the software is the same. (Well, not completely, but the overlap is very close to 100%.) Many people writing Free Software or open source don't really care which one they're doing. Many people advocating them don't make a clear distinction.
People or companies who develop open source are usually helping Free Software (often against their will), but can sometimes also be harmful. People or companies who develop Free Software are usually helping open source (often against their will), but can sometimes also be harmful.
Myself, I do Free Software for personal choice, but I'll accept an open-source job if it doesn't require me to do things harmful to Free Software (I am in fact in one such job right now).
What? You want to know if I have a point? Yes, I see, this has already run quite long-winded, I'm sorry. I guess my point is that, well, open-source people should acknowledge the existence of Free Software and pay it a bit more respect; and Free Software people should keep an eye open for the fact that not everyone who is developing the same stuff as you, is doing it with the same goals.