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It's a familiar story. Microsoft does a secret deal with a company over patent licences. Almost no details are provided about which patents, how much money has changed hands, or why, except for one vaguely worded press release that talks about how such secret deals benefit the customer through openness and innovation.
To say that there were some noise on the Web when Sun recently bought MySQL for $1 billion would be an understatement, to say the least. It’s the largest open source deal ever, and the latest in a series of large open source acquisitions.
Few events have created more fodder for the blogosphere, more fuel for Microsoft critics and more emotional responses than the Microsoft patent deals with Novell, Linspire and Xandros. While putting together a list of things people hate about these deals is easy, generating a list of positive aspects is much harder.
Open World Forum and Open Source Think Tank to bring together key players from the world of Free, Libre and Open Source Software in Paris, September 28th-2nd October 2009.
Sonty added that he thinks Microsoft "is lining up partners to go against" Red Hat and Ubuntu, which he sees as the company's biggest threats in the Linux camp. "The battle is just beginning," he wrote. "We don't know what is underneath the iceberg yet."
If you ask me, the title should be "They would love the community to be divided over Microsoft deals"
"Could it be that Microsoft is finally facing the reality that: the future is one of open source and if they act now, through deals, they can painlessly become a part of it?"
One of the biggest problems with open source is understanding what it means out in the real world. I'm talking about the impact of open source. How open source is actually useful.
Latest examples of Microsoft's strategy, wherein it sends out affiliates to pretend to be FOSS people and then promote software patent deals, separation between Open Source and Free software, departure from the GPL, promotion of "open" core (proprietary) as "Open Source", and demotion of free/libre platforms like GNU/Linux along with free suites/formats like ODF
