People don't use Linux "to get away from Microsoft", but to get a better product. When the market requires solutions to run Linux, MSFT has three choices:
1) Ignore the money they could make on that market.
2) Deliver software for Linux but not the OS.
3) Deliver a complete Linux solution including the OS.
It doesn't take much to see, that if Linux continues to grow, as it has done the last 9 years, Microsoft will have to do 2) or 3) to satisfy investors. And since most software companies would like to be able to deliver all software that runs on a computer, option 3) will come.
The only question is: When?
Microsoft .net is a good excuse to start delivering Linux software. Since .net has to run on several platforms, their CLI technology needs to run on Linux, too. They have a deal with Corel, that they will do some stuff on that.
MSFT already provided source-code to an open-source project: Perl. Mainly in order to make it Unicode compatible on Windows NT, but since Perl is often considered Unix/Linux technology, and is open-source, they already begun.
Lars. |
