I was startled to find an important interview on Microsoft's relationship with open-source development on Sam Dean's OSTATIC blog a few minutes ago.
Here are the four questions that Dean reports from his interview with three Microsoft representatives involved with open source at Microsoft:
- Microsoft has, in the past, employed key open source development concepts such as modular architectures in its own products. Do you foresee more of this, including developing directly on top of existing open source platforms?
- What do you think is missing in the open source community as a whole? Better marketing for commercial efforts? Better compatibility?
- Does Microsoft's recently announced Live Mesh platform have implications that the open source community ought to know about?
- What goals do you have for Microsoft's interoperability alliance with Novell, and what's behind the goal of converting Linux users in the Chinese market to SUSE Linux Enterprise?
I'm not going to attempt to summarize the remarkable responses to this fascinating choice of questions. I recommend the article.
I found this quite remarkable. This note is cross-posted from my blog and I wonder what more conversation like that one would be interesting here too.
