Re: [tlug] Microsoft to embrace Linux -- not a joke!

[stephen@example.com]

Scott Robbins writes:

 > I'm waiting for Stephen's--no, Dr. Turnbull's take, as it's an economic
 > thang--on this.

Wash yer mouth out with soap, I don't have to take that from you! ;-)

More seriously, it's actually not "economics", not as I do economics.
I freely admit we don't have the tools to handle strategy at this
level.

FWIW, as a non-expert[sic] who does think about this stuff pretty
frequently, I think that most of the top guys and gals at Microsoft
think of themselves as a (mostly) benevolent monopoly.  You can
complain about their prices all you like (and IMHO you'd be right),
but in the first world they have a market penetration approaching that
of air conditioners (though not Gameboys, quite yet), which says a lot
about the benefit-to-price ratio they've achieved.  I can't blame them
for thinking of themselves as the successors of Rockefeller and
Carnegie (who were similarly derided as robber barons in their time).

Expect them to play hardball, but I think they've realized that
there's something going on that they haven't managed to incorporate
into their game plan yet, and they want a piece of it.  I think they
know they can't beat the open source movement (modulo a coup d'etat at
the U.S. Supreme Court), but I can see them trying to suborn some OSS
companies and/or developers.

Those of you who know about the Darcs version control system
presumably know it's written in Haskell.  One of the leading lights in
the Haskell community is Simon Peyton-Jones, who now works for
Microsoft but continues to contribute to GHC (a GPLed compiler which
dominates the Haskell field the way Michael Jordan used to dominate
basketball) regularly, and to Darcs itself on occasion.  There are a
couple other big names like that I can't remember off-hand.

I figure that as long it doesn't actively conflict with the Windows
monopoly, Microsoft will probably tolerate it.