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Microsoft Buys Teamprise, Will Ship Linux Tools
spongman writes "Microsoft's Senior Vice President, Developer Division, S. Somasegar has announced that Microsoft has acquired Teamprise from Sourcegear, LLC, and will be shipping it as part of the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 release. Teamprise is an Eclipse plugin (and related tools) for connecting to Team Foundation Server, Microsoft's source-control/project-management system. What's most interesting about this is not only that Microsoft has realized that heterogeneous development platforms are important to their developer customers, but the fact that Microsoft themselves will now be developing and shipping products based on those heterogeneous platforms, including 5 versions of Unix."
I rather have the equivalent of VS on Linux than just another Eclipse plug-in. Here comes the Embrace...
> but the fact that Microsoft themselves will now be developing and shipping products based on those heterogeneous platforms, including 5 versions of Unix."
Are you sure? You may find Microsoft do the same thing here and just strip the Linux functionality out. When Microsoft took over Connectix and their excellent Virtual PC Software and proceeded to strip Linux functionality (that was already there) out of the product. On the Connectix version there was a Linux utility that handled control back to Windows when the CPU was idle. On the Microsoft version they took that out, so the CPU always ran at 100%. It made Virtual PC useless for Linux.
Wrong reasoning for IBM and Google.
Some time ago (don't know if it is still this way) IBM was divided basically in two separate blocks, one working on OSS and the other on proprietary closed source software with the veto of the two sharing any piece of code for fear of accidenta infringement.
Google, instead, offers basically no proprietary, closed source software. The software is either on their server (and thus allowed to contain GPL code and still be kept private because it is not distributed) or OOS (Chrome). Possible exception: Picasa, I have to check :)
Microsoft has the manpower and the money to deliver. Their problem is backwards compatibility cruft and hardware support if they would start over.
Given the fact that Linux already poses a thread to Windows, it would not hurt for Microsoft do develop and releasy a Unix(y), free software OS alongside of Windows. Why?
A) To prove that they can actually make a good OS. Press and restecpa right there.
B) They can offer a stable and advanced OS to people/companies that do not care about legacy compatibility.
C) They can always port over a closed source version of Office and make it compatible with exchange and whatnot (and release that code under a free software license that is like the GPL, but isn't so that Linux projects can't take over that very code
D) Keep marketshare. If people don't want to use Windows anyway; they can use their other OS.
Everybody would probably be happy.
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