Is that anything like art for art’s sake?

This exchange (cobbled together into one article from separate eWeek interviews) proves the maxim (recently popularized by Al Gore) that you can’t make someone understand something when earning their paycheck depends on not understanding it.

It also shows the power of successfully framing a problem, and the importance of sharing that frame in order for the problem to be solved.

Kind of fascinating.

Red Hat’s Paul Cormier speaks:

But the Linux vendor wants to limit those talks to pure interoperability between Windows and Red Hat Linux, with the goal of solving real customer problems, Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president of engineering, told eWEEK.

“I want to talk to the folks at Microsoft about our two operating systems and how we can work together to solve real customer problems without attaching any unrelated strings, such as intellectual property,” he said.

While Cormier declined to comment on why its earlier talks with Microsoft fell through, he ruled out any possibility of Red Hat doing a deal with Microsoft like the controversial patent agreement and covenant not to sue that Redmond penned with Novell last year, especially after viewing the limited information that is publicly available on that deal.

Microsoft’s Bob Muglia does too:

“But it is necessary to have a conversation about intellectual property when it comes to open source, and you can’t just sit back and talk about interoperability for interoperability’s sake without fully solving the customer issue. Unless you actually address the issues around IP, you haven’t fully solved the customer’s interoperability problem,” Muglia said.

Nope. No shared understanding of the problem to be found anywhere near this “conversation.”