'Microsoft Linux' rumours?

"We are going to cut off their air supply. Everything they're selling, we're going to give away for free."

--Paul Maritz, former Microsoft Vice President (now VMWare CEO)

Summary: New rumours circulate about Microsoft-dominated VMware's plans for GNU/Linux

VMware is already filled with former Microsoft employees in its management [1, 2, 3] and earlier this month we showed that VMware was geographically moving closer to Redmond. Novell's de Icaza has this to say now:

This is a pure rumour, sourced from random tweets. But it comes from Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome and Mono, so it has a certain investment of radiance.

His first tweet:

"VMware is creating a new Linux distro, according to the recruiting spam they are sending on Linked In."

This ought to lead to speculations.

A couple of months ago, Matt Asay published a post which asserted that "VMware puts squeeze on Red Hat with SpringSource buy" and there are other important issues to take into account [1, 2]. ⬆