By Justin Silverton

From a recent Microsoft announcement:

“We will love to put that kind of agreement in place with anyone who distributes Linux software, Red Hat, whoever else,” Steve Ballmer told India’s Economic Times in an interview published on Thursday.

Ballmer, on a visit to India, said while he believed software would be increasingly downloaded and managed off the Internet, it would still also be sold through a more traditional chain.

“I think some software will be bought, some will be subscribed to and some will be monetized through advertising,” Ballmer said in the interview in New Delhi.

“I would say we are moving to a world where there is a lot more electronic distribution. It is a new style of software, not the old-style distributed electronically.”

First, Microsoft was against linux and the open source community.  Then, they decided to support the SUSE distro through Novell.  Now They are supporting them all?

It’s very interesting that they have made all of these announcements within a couple of months from the release of Vista, the new Microsoft operating system (Retail Versions are set to be released on January 30. 2007).

One of the main strengths of any open source project is that as long as it is under a license such as the GNU, it can never be closed to the public.  There will always be some form of the source code available to view, develop, and use.  A strategy that corporations seem to be following is that if they can buy out (hire) the main developers (Microsoft has done this in the past), they can basically stop development of that project and remove their competitor from the market (even if it’s free) 

A new strategy has also started to emerge in the past couple of weeks by Oracle (and now Microsoft).  By directly competing with companies that are supporting/distributing products based on open source, those companies might lose business to the likes of a larger, more powerful company (Redhat’s stock dropped shortly after Oracle’s announcement).