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Microsoft Warms Up to Linux
prostoalex writes "InfoWorld reports that despite warming to the OS, Microsoft won't be releasing its own distribution of Linux any time soon. From the article: "Hilf acknowledged that Microsoft's commitment to Windows does not preclude the company from continuing a strategy he has led in his 19 months at the software vendor: To see how Microsoft's proprietary technologies can better interoperate with Linux and a host of other open-source software. In fact, that is exactly what will be the focus of a discussion the long-time open-source proponent will lead at this year's upcoming Linuxworld Conference & Expo next month in San Francisco. In a session entitled, 'Managing Linux in a Mixed Environment ... at Microsoft?' Hilf, who polished his open-source evangelism skills working on Linux deployments at IBM Corp., will talk about how he and the team at the Linux/Open Source lab run open source technologies in "the most Microsoft-centric IT environment on the planet." "
You guys are funny. The reason why Microsoft has a big linux lab is to get ideas on what to steal. They want to know what their competition is, break it apart in a lab, and attempt to emulate it. This is why Windows XP has better graphics that are basically a poor implementation of the KDE shnazz. Microsoft rarely innovates, they copy poorly and sell it like it's the best 'microsoft idea'.
This is a classic example of a completely useless feature. There's no good reason that I should ever be required to update a driver. Drivers are the sort of bit banging low level, kernel accessing code that should be gotten right on the first try.
There's simply no excuse for needing to update a vendor supplied driver.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And just what makes you think that anyone running Linux wants to be interoperable with MS? That's the fallacy in your logic. If Linspire/Lindows has proven anything, it is that most of the Linux community could care less about MS apps, favoring their own OSS applications (most of which operates much better than anything MS designed). Otherwise, the other distributions like RedHat, Mandriva, Gentoo, etc. would have already gone out of business.
And, you also forget that most people want STANDARD Protocols....MS has proven they can't cope with Standards, and that has done a lot to drive a lot of users TO Linux or other distros.