[Linux-aus] If you could ask Microsoft a question, what would it be?

[Tim Bowden]

On Sun, 2008-01-13 at 01:33 +1100, Steve Walsh wrote:
> Apologies for the cross posting, but this is a topic that affects nearly 
> everyone.
> Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> > /me dons his flame-retardant suit
> >
> > If you could ask Microsoft a question, what would it be?
> >
> > That is not a theoretical question. There's a strong chance that we can have 
> > some fairly senior Microsoft Australia representatives [1] at a SLUG meeting 
> > (likely this month's). One shall be a business person, the others are 
> > engineers.
> The same is occurring for LUV in February. Whilst I don't share the LUV 
> President's belief that "..we've won, man, it's game over", I do think 
> that it's interesting that they appear to have decided to hit two LUG's 
> with rep's willing to receive both pointy and (hopefully not very many) 
> pointless question within a short period of time.

MS are also talking to Apache devs (and I presume other open source
devs).  If the popular tech press is to be believed, MS has come to the
conclusion that open source is here to stay, and they need to find a way
to co-opt it.  From what I understand they have come to the conclusion
they can live with open source so long as it is done on windows.

Perhaps they are looking to build a relationship with those FOSS devs
who are agnostic about platform (ie, are happy doing open source from
the waist up so to speak, and aren't so concerned about the F in FOSS).
MS are probably on the hunt for environments where such open source devs
can be found and consider LUGs to be a prime candidate, hence the start
of a relationship effort.

FWIW, my $0.02
Tim Bowden