Take a look at this little announcement that came out of OSCON last week...

http://port25.technet.com/archive/2008/07/25/oscon2008.aspx

Amazingly, Microsoft has agreed to join the Apache Software Foundation as a platinum sponsor.  Oh, in case you weren't aware, Microsoft has this little product called "IIS" that kind of directly competes against the open-source Apache web server.

Paradoxically, IIS would die to get the market share enjoyed by Apache, yet is neither free as in beer nor as in speech.  A fact that I imagine probably makes for a tough sell for the Microsoft marketing department.

The cynics are saying this is a bold move by Microsoft to help ease the sting caused by the PR fiasco known as "Windows Vista."

"Hey, look at us, you might think we suck and are inherently evil, but suddenly we love open source (well, not anything that is GPL'ed - but I guess that's just common sense)." 

I honestly don't know what to make of it.  I guess in the grand scheme of things, the $100,000 ponied up to join Apache can't even be considered a drop in the bucket for Microsoft.  As they said on TWiT this last weekend, "That just gets them on the mailing list."

Maybe it's like Sun-Tzu said (and later echoed by Michael Coreleone in Godfather II), "Keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer."

Tuesday, July 29, 2008 10:01:31 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  .Net | Apache | IIS | Open Source