Microsoft Plays Up Open Source

An anonymous reader writes "Recently Microsoft's open source software lab posted PostgreSQL on Windows: A Primer. Postgres is one of the longest running open source databases — it has been around for nearly 11 years. The powerful object-relational database is a direct competitor to other OSS databases, as well as Microsoft's SQL Server 2005. So why is Microsoft promoting it? I get Redmond's interest in boosting anything that runs on Windows as a platform. Is this simply a case of left-hand, right-hand, or is something deeper going on?"

Comments

Microsoft has always supported BSD license

[phantomfive]

Nobody has mentioned it yet, so I'll throw in my two cents. Microsoft is not against open source at all, they actively encourage and even use it on occasion (the TCP stack in windows is famously known to be from BSD Unix). They are happy when people write code that they can use.

Where they have the biggest problem is with GPL'd stuff, which they can't use at all. Of course in this particular situation there are other factors involved, but since they have been addressed by others, I will not repeat them here.