The arrival of a former airline executive to run leading Linux distributor Red Hat looks like a sign of the times.

Matthew Szulik, who held the CEO job for nearly a decade, was a warrior of the software holy wars, a man with a strong philosophical belief in the importance of the GPL and a clear distate for proprietary software and the business tactics often used to entrench it.

By contrast, newcomer James Whitehurst comes across as a pragmatist (Szulik said just before Christmas that he was stepping down, but would remain chairman.)

When I spoke to Whitehurst on Thursday - his third day on the job - his defence of open source was on purely practical rather than philosophical grounds:

Fundamentally, it’s a better way to develop software. Would I describe myself as a zealot, and proprietary software as evil? No, definitely not.

That’s a big change. For good measure, he also struck a conciliatory tone when asked about arch-enemy Microsoft, saying that he would be willing to enter discussions with the software giant "if there’s any partner out there who wants to chat about things that would help customers."

Who knows if this signals a thaw ahead. But with Microsoft already cozying up to Novell and helping to sell support contracts for SuSe Linux, the software industry’s philosophical divide is starting to look much less pronounced.