[vox] Microsoft embracing Linux and Open Source?

[Tim Riley]

"R. Douglas Barbieri" wrote:

> Woah. This is just puzzling:
>
> http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/09/18/microsoft.gates.ap/index.html
>
> "NEW YORK (AP) -- It's not often that Bill Gates is associated with the
> free Linux computer operating system, Netscape's Web browser or
> royalty-free software, but on Wednesday he embraced all three."
>

This was a catchy introductory paragraph; however, the details of the
article didn't mention anything at the operating system or browser layer.
Instead, it seems that the collaboration between Microsoft and IBM is for
the development of protocols in between the two layers to handle secured
transactions.

>
> I'd like to believe that Bill Gates has finally "seen the light" about
> open source,  but the cynic in me suspects the good old "embrace, extend
> and extingish" approach.  I'd really like to know what other lugnuts
> think about this article.  I'm not quite sure how to take it.
>

I think this arrangement between IBM and Microsoft is showing that at the
commerce level (not the home computing level), IBM is the dominant
force. It seems that IBM wanted to implement a protocol to handle
secured transactions between commercial enterprises (like banks or credit
card companies, maybe), and if Microsoft wanted any say in the matter,
Microsoft
would have to accept IBM's rule of royalty free.

But this doesn't mean that the software written by these two
companies will be open source; however,
it seems that the door is open for someone else to write the protocol and
distribute it with Linux as open source.

>
> --
> R. Douglas Barbieri
> doug@dooglio.net
> http://www.dooglio.net
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