The Goal of Coopetition Assumes You're Friends
It'll fail; it will never work with Microsoft.
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it."
Tomorrow morning we'll publish "The Man Who Helped Microsoft Kill Linux is Trying to Delay Our Lawsuits Against Him" (but the headline might as well name BSD as well, though which one?).
See, with Microsoft you're guaranteed to get screwed over. It always happens. It'll continue to happen. This big cat won't change its spots, just the propositions (lies).
In an article entitled "Ballmer on Novell, Linux and patents" Steve Ballmer was once quoted as saying:
“What we [Novell and Microsoft] agreed, which is true, is we'll continue to try to grow Windows share at the expense of Linux. That's kind of our job. But to the degree that people are going to deploy Linux, we want Suse Linux to have the highest percent share of that, because only a customer who has Suse Linux actually has paid properly for the use of intellectual property from Microsoft. And we took a quota, you could say, to help them sell so much Suse Linux. That's part of the deal. We are willing to do the same deal with Red Hat and other Linux distributors, it's not an exclusive thing. But after a few years of working on this problem, Novell actually saw the business opportunity, because there's so many customers who say, 'Hey look, we don't want problems. We don't want any intellectual property problem or anything else. There's just a variety of workloads where we, today, feel like we want to run Linux. Please help us Microsoft and please work with the distributors to solve this problem, don't come try to license this individually.' So customer push drove us to where we got.”
Well, where is Novell today? That's right, it's gone. Microsoft is done.
Now Red Hat is being infiltrated by yet more Microsofters, as well (like Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza inside Novell). On Monday it's expected there will be mass layoffs, perhaps impacting the staff that's keeping Linux (for now) barely booting under 'secure' boot, which Microsoft controls remotely. We'll write more about this tomorrow.
Microsoft never stopped trying to kill Linux. It only got better at lying about it and bribing large news sites to repeat the lies. █