Why Microsoft Cozied up to Open Source at OSCON

This year at OSCON it seemed that you couldn't throw a stone without hitting someone from Microsoft (and in fact, I'm sure several people did). They were working very hard to make themselves known, and working desperately to change public opinion of Microsoft's involvement in the open source community. Linux.com's Nathan Willis took a look at what they were preaching, with a hefty dose of skepticism, and tries to postulate what the "angle" is. Of course, the powers that be at Microsoft may have finally seen the writing on the wall and felt the pressure from Google enough to alter their strategy a bit. For now I guess we'll have to wait with guarded optimism (or laughable contempt, depending on how old/jaded you are).

Comments

Re:MS cannot be trusted

[harlows_monkeys]

*IF* MS wanted to be open source friendly, things like OOXML would just vanish

So, to be friendly to open source, they should get rid of the only open document format that can handle billions of legacy documents without losing fidelity???

Re:All together now:

[A nonymous Coward]

Microsoft has, what, 30 years of history? They earned their rep the old fashioned way, they worked hard for it, and now they are stuck with it. 30 years of Microsoft lies and thievery and fraud in general, and full time slander ("cancer", "fraud", you name it) since they first became aware of the GPL and free source software ...

It'll take more than one convention to turn their rep around.

And MS fan boys, don't accuse me of exaggeration with that "lies and thievery and fraud" until you can explain away their full history of lies and thievery and fraud.