OVER the past year or two we have shown how inter-personal relationships (including staff moves) have enabled Microsoft to gain more influence inside Eclipse -- influence that they mostly used to spread Microsoft lock-in such as Silver Lie, excluding GNU/Linux users in the process. To name a few posts on the subject:
Soyatec, who have been working with with Microsoft to develop the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight, helped with implementing the support of Azure and Silverlight. This has lead to the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, an open source plug-in that enables PHP developers working with the Eclipse development environment to develop web applications for Azure.
“Microsoft is trying to hijack "open source" and paint "free software" as negative, as usual.”The question which was then asked is: "Do you think this difference between open source and free software is correct? Maybe this explains Microsoft thinking in starting to promote open source - that developers don't care about Linux and will gladly help Microsoft maintain Windows."
Well, Sam Ramji is being dishonest, but maybe not deliberately. Microsoft is trying to hijack "open source" and paint "free software" as negative, as usual. "Free software" and "open source" are inherently the same in many technical ways and another pattern of Microsoft FUD -- the one Ramji disagrees with -- is that Free software cannot be "commercial". Bill Gates is among those who spread this lie, so the problem resides deep inside the company. It's probably a good thing that Ramji quit Microsoft last month.
Microsoft is still an enemy of Free software by its very own choice. Recently enough Microsoft got caught planning a software patent coup [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], not to mention lawsuits by proxy such as T3.
It is actually amusing to find articles like this new one from Carmi Levy, who messes up completely and ignores the OOXML corruptions, for example. By means of whitewashing and selective eyesight he tries to portray Microsoft as an ethically-reformed company. Here is the part about Novell:
Networking. While Novell rightly gets credit for defining and popularizing the modern Local Area Network, Microsoft's Windows NT Server assumed the mantle and drove the concept into the heart of corporate IT. It certainly wasn't always pretty, especially if you were responsible for patching and securing it, but it was a good enough, familiar enough product family for most organizations.
--Bill Gates, April 2008