When Sam Ramji, Director of Platform Technology Strategy and the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft, describes his company's open source strategy, I believe him. Every word.

Whenever I write about Microsoft here I usually get a few comments asking me, with varying degrees of politeness, why I am wasting electrons on this subject on a site devoted to GNU/Linux. The reason I do this – and why I am about to do it again – is that whether we like it or not, Microsoft remains probably the single most important external factor in the free software world.

Oracle's open source strategy was looking a little fenced in this morning, after the database giant lost one of its most prominent voices and OpenOffice was snubbed by Ubuntu developers. Ken Jacobs resigned from Oracle late last week, according to reports.

The embargo is lifted so we can now share with you what AMD's new open-source strategy for ATI GPUs is all about. You may be in for a real surprise!

An exec at the software giant argues that Microsoft is open to working with open source. And in the current down economy, the strategy is paying off.

What a goldmine my inbox was this morning. I also received the news that Microsoft’s Windows Competitive Strategy team is searching, via Linkedin, for “a strong team member to lead Microsoft’s global desktop competitive strategy as it relates to open source competitors.”

Does Microsoft have an open-source strategy — beyond finding new ways to thwart Linux and other non-proprietary wares?

Microsoft has appointed a new point man to put a face on its interaction with the open source community. That man, Robert Duffner, takes on a big task as senior director of Platform and Open Source Software strategy at Microsoft. His IBM and BEA roots will help him place his mark on the Microsoft strategy, but the core message remains the same.

Deishin Lee of Harvard Business School, and Professor Haim Mendelson of Stanford's Graduate School of Business, eloquently lay out a strategy in a recent paper for squashing open source competition. Ironically, it's also a road map for open source companies to use to defeat their entrenched and expensive rivals.