Is Microsoft offering an olive branch to open source and Linux? Or is Microsoft just putting the best possible face on its defeat by the EU justice system, and its recent statements are really just business as usual? If you ask people in the open-source community you'll find answers from one end of the spectrum to the other.

By pushing law-enforcing action to the end of term, Microsoft has successfully bamboozled the Commission

Microsoft is being crushed by software freedom, so in order to survive it can only invent bogus standards and a bogus definition of the very same paradigm it's competing against and trying to coopt

Former Microsoft employee announces that Canonical will send Ubuntu users to Microsoft's datacentres and herein we explain why it's a big mistake that will alienate users

In this week’s edition of TLWIR, I will take a look at the continuing twentieth anniversary celebration of our beloved GNU/Linux operating system. I will also look at Microsoft’s olive branch extended to the Linux community. In yet another surprising turn of events, the U.S. Department of Defense has released its own GNU/Linux distribution.

Well, no, not a food olive bazaar (though that would be tasty), but rather Olive, a GTK GUI for Bazaar, a version control system similar to GIT and Subversion. We’re not going to go into the differences between the systems, but rather focus on this interesting application, now merged into the Bazaar GTK project.

One minute ago Microsoft made one of its first "open source" moves under the new Microsoft Reference License: the team in Redmond announced they'll make some .NET libraries available. I say "open source" because to me, open source means you can easily access a .tar or .zip of the code. Microsoft's effort is a bit more cumbersome.

So the great moment has arrived. But how do I make the switch? I have horrible memories of struggling with new partitions, running into special bits of Microsoft code designed precisely to make it tough to switch to another operating system … Maybe there is a better way?

The open source community is literally rocking the world and so is India’s largest Linux and Open Source convention and expo. The community is now being supported by Microsoft, long considered to be the 'opposing side'. Open Source India Week (OSIW) 2008 kicked off yesterday in Delhi after completing the Bengalure and Mumbai editions. At the occasion, Radhesh Balakrishnan, director, platform strategy, Microsoft, could be seen wooing the open source community, holding an olive branch in the form of promoting interoperability between the two systems.