Microsoft Sponsors Apache Software Foundation 120
gbjbaanb writes "Ars Technica reports that Microsoft is to sponsor the Apache Foundation to the tune of $100k. From the article: 'I asked him if this could possibly be the beginning of a broader initiative by Microsoft to increase Apache compatibility with .NET web development technologies, but he says it's still too early to guess Microsoft's future plans for Apache participation. ... He doesn't anticipate a confrontational response from the developers working on individual Apache projects ... The response of the broader open source software community, however, is harder to predict.' (In related news, MS also intends to participate in the RubySpec project.)"
Re:Microsoft Support of OSS (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not so sure... IIS serves as a tie-in to quite a few different (and damned profitable) Microsoft products... starting with Exchange (for OWA), and branching out a couple thousand different directions from there.
Microsoft's income depends way too heavily on products having exclusive interoperability (e.g. IIS, Exchange, Active Directory...)
Start breaking that up, and enterprises would be more easily liable to start choosing solutions that don't have acronyms like "CAL" anywhere in the invoice.
While yes, IIS is pretty much a money hole for MSFT in a direct sense, they have way too many enterprise products that rely on its existence, and it in turn requires Windows, and only Windows.
To push for wider adoption of M$ standards (Score:2, Interesting)
He believes that this move is based on a legitimate desire by Microsoft to foster collaborative development of Apache technologies that implement Microsoft standards.
If that's true, then we have a grave situation. M$ can make apache compatible with M$'s home-grown standards and then claim that the standards themselves are open standards. Since the percentage of IT people who mistake an open-source implementation as an open standard is almost 100%, M$ can even be very successful at this. Since the standards themselves are not open, all web servers, except Apache and M$-IIS, will soon die out. Finally M$ withdraws support for Apache and thus giving it a final blow. Now M$-IIS becomes the king. I know that I'm sounding like a conspiracy theorist. But we have seen enough instances of this Embrace-Extend-Extinguish policy.