Microsoft to Give Away Software

dptalia writes "In an attempt to suck up to the European Union, Microsoft has announced that it will give away software allowing multiple operating systems to run simultaneously. Microsoft says this is part of their strategy to make more software available through OSS." From the article: "Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, said he had not seen the details of Microsoft's giveaway but cautioned against assuming it was motivated only by pragmatism or a new spirit of cooperation. 'If Microsoft were doing this for altruistic reasons, it would be a first,' Greve said. 'I think they are probably trying to get more machines on the Windows platform, and they may also be trying to improve relations in Brussels.'"

Comments

I'm guessing the reason is quite simple...

[Kjella]

With TCPA, Microsoft needs to be in control of the whole boot process. Any form of "untrusted" boot manager like LILO or GRUB to allow users to dual boot with Windows would probably break that chain:

BIOS -> LILO/GRUB -> Windows = No TCPA

With their bootloader you can either go:
BIOS -> Windows Boot Manager -> Windows = TCPA
BIOS -> Windows Boot Manager -> Other = No TCPA

The rest is just marketing fluff so this solution is adopted.

Re:Interesting Decision

[dgatwood]

Their intentions seem pretty straightforward to me. It's not about running other operating systems so much as running other Windows operating systems, with other OSes being a side effect that doesn't cost them any additional effort (except the struggle to put aside their lust for dominance for a little while).

The reason Microsoft stated for buying Virtual PC was so that they could build an emulation environment that would allow them to bundle enough of the old versions of Windows so that they could basically scythe out vast swaths of legacy code from their OS. I suspect this is the intent behind this effort as well. Why bother supporting all those 16-bit apps when you can emulate them in a VM? That's doubly important if they ever plan to support 16-bit code in 64-bit WIndows (which they currently do not).