"Red Hat's chief technology officer has maintained that an intellectual property agreement with Microsoft is not necessary for the company to enable interoperability between Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

Back in 2001 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux a “cancer” that threatened the company, but now the Redmond giant claims to “love open source.” Well, actions speak louder than words.

« Many universities and engineering schools provide their students with a free Microsoft Windows ® license through a partner program with Microsoft. Yet, when students buy a new computer, they also pay for another (OEM) Microsoft Windows ® license included in the computer price.

The OSI License-Discuss mailing list has been ablaze for the past few days since Microsoft submitted its Permissive License (MS-PL) to the OSI [Open Source Initiative] for official open source license approval.

"Wednesday night’s Microsoft (MSFT) press release about open source software [OSS] began with one of the most loaded sentences in OSS history: “Today Microsoft Corp. and Linux desktop provider Linspire Inc. announced a broad interoperability, technical collaboration (sic) that also includes intellectual property [IP] assurances.”"

Everyone in the Linux world remembers Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's famous comment that Linux is a "cancer" that threatened Microsoft's intellectual property. In 2010 Microsoft is trying hard not to be public enemy No. 1.

Recently word started getting around that the terms for getting apps on Windows Phone 7, and indie games on the Xbox, have changed. Now, programs submitted to Microsoft cannot have any code licensed under a copyleft license. Even if a single file is licensed under a weaker copyleft license like the LGPL, Microsoft will apparently reject it.

Director of Source Program at Microsoft Corporation Jon Rosenberg submitted its Shared Source License called "Microsoft Community License" to Open Source Initiative for considering it as an OSI approved Open Source License.

In an historic move, Microsoft Monday submitted driver source code for inclusion in the Linux kernel under a GPLv2 license.