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 Open Source is a Web Fallback

[QuietLagoon]

Google has failed in web apps fairly well,
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Google needs to release its web office applications as a server that can be installed in a corporate datacenter. That would allow corporations to maintain full and auditable control over their data, while leaving the high cost of MS Office behind.

Cashing the GNU

[Lucas.Langa]

What about this crazy idea:

1. take an interesting open-source project Foobar
2. if there's a need of new feature, write them
3. hell, even release the changes as open source as well
4. package it as Microsoft Foobar
5. sell the product like mad in ways no other company is capable of (think OEMs, institutions, government, lawyers, etc.)
6. PROFIT

Yeah, there even doesn't have to be a "???" step.