When you can't do it yourself, use a proxy

Microsoft's plan to infiltrate the Linux and open source world is no news to us. To repeat some recent news, Microsoft openly expressed its intentions to buy open source companies. Quick flashback to last month:

"We will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products," Ballmer said during an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Microsoft's CEO said this when he laid out plans to acquire about 20 companies per year for the next 5 years.

Some further analysis talked about the conseuqnces

Is Microsoft Hijacking Open Source?

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In this context, the recent approval of two Microsoft licences as officially “open source” is only going to make things worse.

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What we are seeing here are a series of major assaults on different but related fields – open source, open file formats and open standards. All are directed to one goal: the hijacking of the very concept of openness. If we are to stop this inner corrosion, we must point out whenever we see wilful misuse and lazy misunderstandings of the term, and we must strive to make the real state of affairs quite clear. If we don't, then core concepts like “open source” will be massaged, kneaded and pummelled into uselessness.

Let's return to an old issue that is covered here frequently. As one example among several we have XenSource, which was an open source company. It had pro-Linux bias before it got snatched by Citrix. We insist that Microsoft had involvement in this. It was strategic. Citrix bent Xen in Windows' way very immediately (the announcement about the acquisition gave that away and spotted by Matthew Aslett). Can Citrix even deny its glee in the following new interview? It doesn't seem so.

You said earlier this year that Citrix is an "admirer" of Microsoft for its innovation, Adobe for its strong brand and Apple for its easy-to-use products. After watching your swift acquisition pace and the kind of companies you target for acquisition, I would argue Citrix is patterned more after Cisco Systems. Do you think that's a reasonable argument?

You are thinking of the acquisition point of view instead of the comments I made. Those were about role models. Cisco has not been a role model for our acquisitions. They are a fabulous company. We love Cisco. When I talk about Microsoft, Adobe and Apple, they are role models for the things I cited.

Cisco is another fine example of a Microsoft partner, which is bound to get betrayed. So there you have it. A self-confessed "Microsoft admirer" has bought a company too large for Microsoft to escape the radar of the FTC and various GPL watchers/enforcers. The more time goes by, the more pieces fall right into place. The puzzle is merely solved, but if only more people were aware of it.

Related articles;

• Heady Days for Virtual Systems

The former Microsoft Latest News about Microsoft general manager is now vice president of XenSource, a Palo Alto, Calif., virtualization company with a growing outpost in Redmond, Wash.

• What the XenSource deal says about open source

This is what Citrix is paying for. That and a close relationship with Microsoft that looks likely to get closer. “We will be building dynamic virtualization services and management tools on top of Viridian,” Levine added. “We will build the same set of products we’ve built on top of Xen for Viridian. We’ve already hired a team to go do that up in Redmond.”

While Citrix maintained it will continue support for the Xen project, this deal is not about a proprietary vendor getting open source religion. It's about grabbing an emerging player in a rapidly expanding sector of the market.

• Will Microsoft Buy the New Citrix?

VMware, holding some 85 percent of the market, with its VI3 technologies offers a fully integrated stack and represents a third generation of virtualization technology, while Viridian and Xen-based products, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, XenEnterprise and Virtual Iron, remain second-generation products, the report stated.