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[Mad Penguin]

Open source has moved into Microsoft's beating corporate heart. Redmond's new open source group reports to the company number two, chief operating officer and aggressive compete-to-win-type Kevin Turner.

James Utzschneider has been named Microsoft's general manager of open source, a role that will see him and a team of 80 individuals lobby governments, Microsoft's army of systems integrators, and everyone else on how the company is working to make Windows inter-operate with Linux and open source.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/01/microsoft_open_source_gm/ (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/01/microsoft_open_source_gm/)

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

It will be interesting to say the least to see how this pans out, but I'm having difficulty believing Microsofts view of Open Source has changed, and I think they'll have a long way to go to convince 'most' people.

It's hard to see how the M$ corporate way of doing things CAN be reconciled with Open Source... this would take a major seed change in M$ thinking which I'm not seeing, with their annual 10-K form listing a lot of open source projects as competitors, and considering past behavior, I'm having difficulty seeing this as anything other than an 'attack from the inside'.

Hopefully I'm wrong... Maybe M$ has decided (finally) that closed source/proprietary is dead/dying, so they had better join the bandwagon.

Who knows, we might even see an M$Linux distro

Article on Microsofts annual Form 10-K filing with the Security and Exchange commission:
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/special/open-source-invades-microsofts-competitor-list (http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/special/open-source-invades-microsofts-competitor-list)