Microsoft’s hire of Tom Hanrahan (right), formerly director of engineering for the Linux Foundation (and before that of the OSDL, one of its predecessors) says a lot about the company’s true open source situation.

As Microsoft is chided by the media and in the blogosphere about its decision to hire comedian Jerry Seinfeld as the new Vista spokesperson, I ponder just who the Linux community would hire as their representative.

Microsoft must really love open source and want to see it succeed. Recently, Microsoft's open-source team lead, Sam Ramji, urged open-source vendors not to compete with Microsoft on price, but instead focus on "value."

Microsoft's agenda gets spread to other areas using a European booster-for-hire who masquerades as a "FOSS" guy

This is not about being anti-Microsoft. I oversee thousands of machines that use Microsoft software, and many users need applications that are available only for the Microsoft environment. It's not about being anti-Apple. I respect the user experience of Mac OS X, and I wish Steve Jobs would license the operating system to other hardware manufacturers.

Microsoft is looking for “Linux and Open Office Compete Lead” this could turn out for the good of everyone This one depends on just what they’re looking to do. If on the other decide to use the competition to create better more reliable and secure products, then this could turn out so much better for both the consumer and in fact open source as well.

For the next couple of Linux Monday posts, I'll be testing out my legacy Microsoft Office files in Open Office, Linux world's main alternative. This is, by necessity, a one-way test. Files in Microsoft Office formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) can be opened in Open Office; the open source community recognizes the need.

Open source has infiltrated so many levels of IT over the past decade. It has been a slow process, however slowly but surely it has become a normality. And even though many companies are adopting open source software, they are hesitant to bring open source developers into the fold. Let’s take a look at some good reasons to hire open source developers.

Microsoft does not compete but rather it is attempting to simply squash or eliminate known deployments of the competition, as a new job posting confirms