02.05.08
Quick Mention: Details About Attempts to Crush GNU/Linux, Inherit FOSS (Updatedx2)
As another timely update to a series of recent posts, consider this one.
Last week, Mary Jo Foley offered commentary on Microsoft’s open source software strategy with respect to independent software vendors based on an interview with Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. Matt Asay provides good colour commentary on his blog. Each post focuses on the trustworthiness and competitive history of the company. Let’s look at things from a different perspective.
“The *AMP stack (plus virtualisation) is particularly attractive, so Microsoft and Sun try to grab it all for themselves.”This long blog posts shows you just how Microsoft hopes to ‘envelope’ Free software while drying up Linux — as solid a platform as it is — from applications and/or developers. Recently we wrote about Xen being taken away after XenSource had struck a partnership with Microsoft and then got acquired by a Microsoft partner. Given the partnership Zend (for PHP) has got with Microsoft, one ought to keep an eye to ensure that Zend isn’t acquired in a similar fashion.
MySQL has already been grabbed by Sun Microsystems and Microsoft recently invited Apache developers to Redmond. Taking the diagram from Mary Jo Foley into account, it should not be hard to see what is happening here. The *AMP stack (plus virtualisation) is particularly attractive, so Microsoft and Sun try to grab it all for themselves. █
Update: The article “Ruby project yields to Microsoft” has just been published.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has welcomed Ruby.NET project participants to its IronRuby project, licensed under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).
Update #2: In relation to update #1, also see this new article from Groklaw. It talks about the destiny of Zimbra.
Thousands of community members have written code for Zimbra for free. Happily, those who were sensible enough to protect the code with the GPL will be able to take it and fork. As for the rest, who knows? Those who chose other licenses will find that Microsoft knows how to squeeze a license for all the rights it wishes to hold, and the full impact of that may fall on Zimbra. Live and learn.
Hopefully this will open some eyes.
