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Mozilla Developers Invited to Redmond
savio13 writes "Sam Ramji, Microsoft's director of its Open Source Software Lab has invited 4 Mozilla developers to spend 4 days with Microsoft's Vista Readiness ISV team. The invite can be found on mozilla.dev.planning and was posted on Saturday (Aug. 19). Schroepfer replied by indicating that Microsoft and the Moz guys are already in contact via email and will follow up on the offer there. This is interesting because Sam posted the offer in a public forum (and indicated that he'd sent a PM, but was posting in case they had an @microsoft.com email filter). Sam also made a point of stating that the Vista ISV Readiness offer is typically only for commercial ISVs."
But seriously, I think that Microsoft is trying to get third party OSS browser support for Vista so that they can announce it as a feature. "Look, we have great support for the BEST free browsers out there! We are cool and friendly!" It has become obvious to Microsoft that OSS is not going away and that they need to embrace some of the popular choices in an effort to stem the flow away from Linux, etc. Seems pretty obvious to me.
My humor is probably your flamebait
There's a simple explanation: it's probably NOT working well, and they want to have a heads-up on what kinda complaint level they'll have. OR, they want to make sure to "break" certain firefox features so that IE looks better.
This is possible, but I don't think it is likely. I suspect the issue is slightly different. Vista's biggest competitor is going to be earlier versions of Windows. Many corporate customers are still using Win2K and many are also using Firefox. Why would they upgrade?
The Firefox crew is pretty sharp but they are techno-junkies. So MS invites the Firefox guys to see some of the whizbang new features of Vista that they can integrate with Firefox to make it better. Maybe they can even get these guys excited about the potential of something. The hope is that the Firefox people will add some feature that will motivate people to want to upgrade to Vista. Even if they just get a feature built into the core tree, maybe the older versions will become unsupported more quickly and for security reasons people will need to move to Vista to have a secure browser.
Remember, MS does not sell IE. They sell a bundle of IE and Windows. Every Firefox user on Windows has already paid them for IE, so using Firefox does not really cost them anything other than a minor strategic bump right now. People not upgrading to Vista costs them hard cash, plus a number of strategic bumps when they don't adopt all the new lock-in anti-features in Vista.
Microsoft has taken some serious steps to clean itself up over the last year or so.
Really? You mean they are no longer illegally bundling IE? Oh yeah they still are. You mean they are no longer paying companies to spread FUD about security and performance? Oh, they're still doing that too. So they are not misleading people by overstating the security of Vista and the compliance of IE? Oh, they did that too. Well surely they aren't still illegally bundling their media player? Huh, they're doing that too. Have they stopped illegally tying their server and desktop to take over more of the server space with an inferior product? No, they are still doing that as well. How exactly have they "cleaned up?"
That said, it's really sad to see that 98% of the comments here are based on distrust, hatred, and bad jokes.
Trust is earned. After the fiftieth or sixtieth time someone punches me the kidneys when I'm looking the other way, it is not sad that I talk about how I suspect they might be trying again. If MS wants my trust they have to earn it and it will take years of ethical, trustworthy behavior before I'm willing to admit that this time they might not be maneuvering for another cheap, sucker punch. Not punching me when I'm looking right at them and a cop is paying attention does not earn them any trust.
This is one of many times you'll see Microsoft bent by the immense power and will of open source!
This is MS looking out for their bottom dollar, probably by trying to get new "Vista only" feature into Firefox to help motivate corporate upgrades either by selling that feature or by hoping it will hasten the demise of mainstream support for Firefox on old versions of Windows. Does this make me trust MS to any greater degree? Hell no, and nor should it.