Microsoft To Exhibit at LinuxWorld Expo

Earendil writes "Linux Today has a confirmed report that Microsoft is going to be an exhibitor at LinuxWorld Expo. One can only guess at what Microsoft's motives might be. It will be interesting to see the reaction to the appearance of a Microsoft booth." No doubt this means that the more childish among us will make us all look bad. Sigh.

Comments

What??!!

[bogie]

"No doubt this means that the more childish among us will make us all look bad. Sigh"

Considering Microsoft has called the GPL a "Cancer" and attacks linux publicly whenever possible by telling outright lies, how can we ever look bad?

Microsoft is publicly out to destroy linux and whatever their motives, they have a lot of nerve to show up in the first place.

Feel free to pelt them with eggs, because that pales in comparison to their attempts to spread FUD and eventually make our OS illegal or impossible to use. Feel free to mod me down, but nothing I said is a lie.

I doubt they'll use this as a stage for FUD..

[gatekeep]

... to do so would only result in no further invitations to similar conferences, and getting them bad press amongst a market I'm sure they see as potential customers.

More likely, I expect they'll have information about their Microsoft Windows services for UNIX

Showing off services for Unix goes much further toward generating revenue for Microsoft than trying to tell people why *nix is bad or somehow inferior. It actually shows that Microsoft cares about interoperability with *nix. True of false, that's probably the message they'll try to convey. I'll withold my opinions on the validity of that message.

I disagree?

[drew_kime]

Remember, in the end MS is out there to make money. Ruling the world is just a means to that end.

Then why is Bill giving away so much to charities? Just for PR? Maybe.

I think it's more likely that the Microsoft coporate personality is more like a control freak than just greedy. Money is the way they maintain control, not the other way around. Remember, money is power.

Just what microsoft wants

[cybercuzco]

I hear alot of people saying something to the effect of "I hope that the MS booth gets trashed because MS Sucks" This is probably EXACTLY what microsoft wants. Think about it, MS has done all it can to portray Linux as a system designed by crackers and script kiddies, one stop short of terrorists. How do you think the government will react if MS get physically attacked at a trade show? MS Will say: "See, we told you that those Linux geeks are all hackers, you cant trust them to make secure systems, but you can trust us, were the victim here." Which is what will happen im sure.

Re:My fear

[MadAhab]

I agree, up to a point. But an emulator might be an interesting "viral" technique for them. For one thing, it gets onto the desktops where linux might be a threat, like in large installations of workstations for, i dunno, the peruvian govt.

Once they get into your machine that way, well, there's all kinds of little features, e.g. sound, that might "accidentally" break here and there unless you are using a particular linux distro. With whom they would naturally have a partnering agreement, since somebody's got to do the support for that. What's next? Gee, you need to use this "drm-approved" sound driver if you want our emulator to work. Sorry. Pretty soon they've taken over your allegedly free system in any way they please.

It doesn't have to work all that well. It shouldn't, in fact. It should work just well enough that it gets adopted, but badly enough to make sure it doesn't outshine their own OS.

Re:One possibiltiy... Linux Business Unit?

[Asprin]

I believe (based on my own highly irrational speculation as well as anecdotes from the MS & IBM OS/2 collaboration - where MS apparently understood OS/2 internals better than IBM's engineers ever did.) that MS probably does have a secret Linux unit operating right now tearing through the source code and gathering 'information' - hell, they probably know more about the Linux kernel than Linus does. I suspect they're also porting unofficial hush-hush Linux version of Office and IE, and probably also a .Net CLI, .Net server and Exchange Server, maybe even their own desktop environment running on top of X. With their R budget, they'd be nuts not to, especially considering that they consider Linux to be a threat.

Now, for those of you who think I've gone all loopy: NO, I don't expect that we're ever going to see 'MS Office for Linux', 'IE for MS-XWindows' or 'MS Linux.net' or anything similar at Comp-USA. If any of this stuff exists, I am quite certain MS is working on it to make their own platform better, and not to join the Linux universe - look how they strung out the Java platform.

Re:Maybe Hell has frozen over...

[Micah]

Odd as it sounds, I actually fully expect that to happen someday. It is ESSENTIAL to the future health of the technology industry that the de-facto platform that people use is open source, and people are finally starting to realize that.

When the tidal wave of people switching to Linux hits -- and I do believe it will within the next couple years -- what else is Microsoft going to do? Their proprietary licenses just won't cut it. They will NEED to make Windows open source to keep control of the platform people use, to keep people from dumping it like a hot potato, and to make a market for their other products.

Of course with OpenOfice.org, they'll even have trouble with THAT. :)