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Even Microsoft recognized its latest move as "a break from the ordinary," which certainly describes the largely closed-source company coughing up 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. But settle down, Windows isn't going open-source.
Instead, the code includes three Linux device drivers, which have been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the LInux tree. Microsoft says the driver code will enhance the performance of Linux when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.
"We are seeing Microsoft communities and open-source communities grow together, which is ultimately of benefit to our customers," said Sam Ramji, senior director of Platform Strategy of Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center (OSTC). "The Linux community, for example, has built a platform used by many customers. So our strategy is to enhance interoperability between the Windows platform and many open-source technologies, which includes Linux, to provide the choices our customers are asking for."
So we guess it's true - we can all just get along after all.
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Comments are closed on this article
charliemikefoxtrot
July 25, 2009 at 11:31am
Pay attention folks, it's not a good deed it's CYA. If you do your research on it you will find out they did this code release two days after they were politely notified that they had violated the GPL with these drivers in using GPL code inside these closed source drivers. They then released the code under GPL with their press department spinning it as a spontaneous good deed before they could be dragged into court again.
-cmf
I Jedi
July 21, 2009 at 3:15pm
I wouldn't say it's necessarily a good "deed" done for the day. Remember, Microsoft is looking to stay in business and they may see this as an opportunity to get Linux more integrated with their own product based line. It's good to see Microsoft help out in the open source field, but I dare not say they're doing it out of the goodness of their corporate hearts. </3
AntiHero
July 25, 2009 at 11:10am
Ok, well, it's not really a good deed because it was for corporate gains. It was done because people runvirualized linux in a window sserver evironment. There wereproblems with this, and therein Windows "solved" the problem. Making their business models more broad and therein getting more users, and upping their credibility to "we're ok with Linux, if you're ok with Linux."
I don't like Microsoft, I associate with it.
