Microsoft’s proposed $45 billion buy of Yahoo would give the Redmond, Wash company control over a top open source e-mail company, open source projects and an open source infrastructure. On September 17 of 2007, Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million. Yahoo’s infrastructure is built on BSD. Yahoo has released a myriad of software to the open source community and even sponsors some open source projects. So this deal would put Microsoft directly into the open source software business.

Over the last decade, free software developers have been repeatedly tempted by development tools that offer the ability to build free software more efficiently or powerfully.

Microsoft has committed to becoming a mixed ASP.NET and PHP shop for the "foreseeable" future should its proposed Yahoo! acquisition succeed, rather than convert popular services like Yahoo! mail to Microsoft's .NET architecture.

We have seen extensive press coverage of Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo over the last few months, including notably excellent coverage from Silicon Alley Insider and the Wall Street Journal. However, I have not seen a detailed analysis of how a full hostile takeover might play out -- the kind of analysis that you would be receiving if you were a Microsoft or Yahoo board member.

Microsoft's agitation of Yahoo! since February 2008 takes its toll on more Free software-oriented staff

Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company's help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter.

Distributed applications, social networks and Web services enable a growing number of vendors to access the innards of users' machines and possibly make use of their private data and personal property, often in ways unknown and with consumers unaware they are doing so.

The last time we wrote about Microsoft insiders, we also mentioned Black Duck as a possibility. Some insiders don’t perceive themselves as such, yet they naturally function in this way.Here you have a Microsoft employee founding and heading a company that sells services around Free software FUD. The company has developed proprietary software only.

After several months of discussion and speculation, the Microsoft-Yahoo buyout deal is apparently off. At least, that's what both Microsoft and Yahoo announced over the weekend. There is some speculation that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made his announcement in order to topple Yahoo's share price, in order to make another offer at a lower price.