Microsoft Sponsors Apache Software Foundation

gbjbaanb writes "Ars Technica reports that Microsoft is to sponsor the Apache Foundation to the tune of $100k. From the article: 'I asked him if this could possibly be the beginning of a broader initiative by Microsoft to increase Apache compatibility with .NET web development technologies, but he says it's still too early to guess Microsoft's future plans for Apache participation. ... He doesn't anticipate a confrontational response from the developers working on individual Apache projects ... The response of the broader open source software community, however, is harder to predict.' (In related news, MS also intends to participate in the RubySpec project.)"

Comments

Re:Microsoft Support of OSS

[Penguinisto]

I'm not so sure... IIS serves as a tie-in to quite a few different (and damned profitable) Microsoft products... starting with Exchange (for OWA), and branching out a couple thousand different directions from there.

Microsoft's income depends way too heavily on products having exclusive interoperability (e.g. IIS, Exchange, Active Directory...)

Start breaking that up, and enterprises would be more easily liable to start choosing solutions that don't have acronyms like "CAL" anywhere in the invoice.

While yes, IIS is pretty much a money hole for MSFT in a direct sense, they have way too many enterprise products that rely on its existence, and it in turn requires Windows, and only Windows.