The other 40%

It seems Jeff Atwood's post on the Two Types of Programmers, as well is it's mother post, has missed a very important niche in the development community: The Microsoft Fanboys.
These are the ones that jumped at the opportunity to develop with MONO, and competed in the Code Project's Race to Linux. The developers who read the C# 3.0 Language Specification just ot improve the CLS compliance of their code. The developers who where hired on to those measly "internal" jobs with the sole purpose of upgrading the companies legacy code to .NET, and convince the company they need MSDN just so they can come home at night and install nightly builds of Windows Server, SQL Server, and Visual Studio in hopes of keeping that company ahead of the curve.
The detail that both Jeff and Ben leave out is the propensity of many Microsoft developers to be just as passionate and dedicated as any Open Source dev.

Shocking Comment #1: I like programming and really enjoy ASP.NET. I think it's neat and fun and interesting and cool how you can go from literally nothing to having a data-driven web application that can be used by people around the world in an amazingly fast amount of time. Furthermore, I want to spread that enthusiasm to folks.

I have an immense amount of respect for anyone who calls themselves "Open Source" and yet does their best to evangelize a Microsoft product. I think it is especially a great testament to what Microsoft has created in .NET when open source advocates like Jeff actually call for more open source .NET projects like MONO and others.

Shocking Comment #2: [The alpha-geeks] get all excited about the latest Linux distro or AJAX toolkit or distributed SCM system, spend all weekend on it, blog about it… and then are confounded about why they can’t get their office to start using it.

I just think it's a sad reality that many of the best software out there is kept behind closed doors for this same reason. The sad facts are stated clearly above. The open source guys can get their companies to use any open source tools, so the best open source doesn't make it into the enterprise, while the fanboys are constantly innovating in the enterprise, but are bound by law in some cases to keep their technology proprietary.

It's a simple but sad state of affairs that in my own cynical mind has no hope of changing any time soon.