Microsoft Open Source Strategy is Upside Down.

Quoting:So, open source is good, as it runs on Windows, Windows Server and Office platform.

That is in a nutshell Microsoft's Open Source Strategy. Open Source is good if it's penned in by Windows.

Interesting thing about the conference reported on here, Microsoft, CodePlex, Port25 are pretty much the same organisation.

Microsoft is interested in Open Source Software, just not Free open Source Software.

> I seem to have already pointed this out.

Yes, you did. And quite correctly too.

Nonetheless, I think Microsoft's strategy is still beneficial to FOSS, because it might equip the MS-users with a more gradual migration path.

If somebody runs Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows, it would not be all that hard to ditch MS entirely, I think. But if they're running IIS, .NET and MS-SQL, they're pretty much "lost" as migration will be too expensive.

> If somebody runs Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows, it would not be all that hard to ditch MS entirely,

Not if Microsoft releases "open source" "enhancements" to them which only work with Windows.

Windows will never ever go truly open source. It just goes against their philosophy of gaining control and keeping it as well as making a huge profit at the expense of those who are afraid of change.

Quoting:Windows will never ever go truly open source.

That's why they will use of support Open Source that depends on Windows, Open Source like Dot Net Nuke, which depends on certain Windows specific libraries.