A look at the latest developments, including Microsoft's semi-hearted support and practical barriers.

Microsoft's technical and legal challenges seem to have urged it to hire elite lobbyists.

Last year was the one of the most active years for legal developments in the history of free and open source (“FOSS”). http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=27 This year, 2008, has seen a continuation of important legal developments for FOSS. My list of the top ten FOSS legal developments in 2008 follows

Microsoft unleashes lobbyists to fight ODF despite pretending to have changed

Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik is not known for avoiding conflicts that threaten his company. So how much longer will it be before he unleashes his legal team to defend against Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s patent accusations in the same way he railed against SCO Group's copyright claims?

Microsoft's earned the respect of certain sections of the open-source community for its engineering work around open-source and Linux. Specifically, its support for MySQL, PHP and JBoss on Windows and its involvement with Eclipse and Apache have been welcomed by developers and various community leaders in and around these technologies and projects.

Waggener Edstrom is trying to change articles about security, on behalf of Microsoft; all Windows PCs are vulnerable

The latest developments in Microsoft's subversive battle against better-priced (and simply better) competition

Microsoft's brigadier Michael Silver helps foil Europe's migration to GNU/Linux, using lies