In the "Town Of Mirrors", there is nobody more omnipresent than self. And that, you see, is the situation up there in Redmond, Washington, which is virtually a town of mirrors.

Submitted to LinuxToday by Jeff 'Microsoft' Gould (on the face of it), the following image shows how badly Microsoft treats competition. Microsoft puts itself at the centre of the world and tries to push GNU/Linux out of it. Here is how Mary Jo Foley puts it:

Microsoft is looking at open-source software (OSS) as just another flavor of independent software vendors (ISV) software. Microsoft’s goal is to convince OSS vendors to port their software to Windows. But Microsoft doesn’t want OSS software to just sit on top of Windows; the company wants this software to be tied into the Windows ecosystem by integrating with Active Directory, Microsoft Office, Expression designer tools, System Center systems-management wares and SQL Server database.

In cases where customers and software vendors want/need Linux to still be part of the picture for some reason, Microsoft will suggest they use Hyper-V, its forthcoming virtualization hypervisor, to run Linux and Linux-dependent applications.

Several points come to mind. Among them:

1. With Hyper-V and the Novell deal, Microsoft hopes to make Linux a 'slave' (VM guest, not host). We covered this many times before and offered quotes confirming it, including ones from Ron Hovsepian.
2. The aspiration to bring all open source software to Windows was mentioned explicitly by Steve Ballmer back in October. Recall the recent Apache story.

In the past 24 hours alone we showed at least two new examples where Microsoft uses Novell. These include:

• Novell is Microsoft's Supercomputers Trojan Horse
• “The Complete End of Novell...” (Novell helps Windows Vista)

“It's easier to crush a single company than an entity which is widely distributed.”It is truly appalling to find that some companies still adopt SLES and SLED, even in places software patents are not legal. Companies that adopt Novell's SUSE are rather foolish. They get absolutely nothing in return and they receive nothing extra apart from 'tax' for mythical patents and unsubstantiated patent claims. "Interoperability" is just a decoy. There is nothing missing in other offerings. It's like offering a buyer aura along with a plasma ball.

Disinformation and ignorance in this area is astounding. The Redmond/Waltham hypnosis machine has had some people believe they get something extra from Novell. Well, that is perhaps what one gets when Bill Gates and Microsoft literally own a lot of the media, so they send messages advocating SLED/S, for which Microsoft gets paid handsomely. They advocate it at the expense of other Linux offerings whose sales Microsoft is not paid for. Microsoft tries to suffocate everything but Novell et al. It's easier to crush a single company than an entity which is widely distributed.

One day people will realise and grasp the truth. We already know all about SCO. ⬆

Update: You may also wish to see Matt Asay's coverage of this and, in particular, his interpretation of the disturbing strategy chart.

Microsoft and open source: Welcome to the Borg?

[...]

As it turns out, it's very similar to Microsoft's general partner strategy: embrace and envelope. (Or embrace, extend, and extinguish, as used to be Microsoft's marching orders.)

This makes Novell just another Microsoft ISV, doesn't it?