As mentioned on numerous websites, Microsoft's Webapplication Installer proposes the installations of open source web applications such as Drupal and Wordpress.

As posted on the JQuery blog, Microsoft will make it part of their development platform, as it will be distributed with Visual Studio. This includes Intellisense support, and will not replace their other technologies, but rather complement it.

In the same blog post, Jquery announced that Nokia will included it in their Web run-time, their widget platform for S60.

This should help new developers, possibly in 100% microsoft shops, discover JQuery, maybe even without knowing they're using an open source tool.

Microsoft has announced that it is sponsoring the Apache Foundation.
The fact that the Apache license allows closed proprietary derivatives, as opposed to the GPL, must have helped Microsoft take this decision.

Microsoft has become a sponsor of the Open Source Census Project. Announced in december, and officially launched earlier this year, the project seems to be gathering steam at the sponsoring level. And as expected, this announcement as been followed by some reactions and coverage.

About the data collection: you can already access to the census reports, which currently are based on 1,316 machines scanned. Which is quite limited to be statistically representative.

As read on OStatic.

Microsoft announced that its next Office Service Pack will bring support for ODF, the standardised format used by OpenOffice which gained support from multiple governments around the world.

The good news is that it will bring the functionality with the Service Pack, but questions remain. What will be the quality of this ODF support? Current MS Office plugins to support ODF (one initiated by Microsoft, the other by Sun) are not perfect. How will the Service Pack compare? Won't this Service Pack eclipse the other plugins even if its quality is mediocre?

Another question: hasn't the competition and lock moved to another level: the content network and management?

Without becoming pessimistic, such announcements raise a lot of questions, and we'd better wait what will be delivered. The EU seems to have the same opinion.

Microsoft announced that System Center will support the Linux distributions from RedHat and Suse. The solution is based on Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, where Microsoft will join the Steering comitee, and contribute code under the Microsoft Public License (OSI approved)

As announced on the samba website, "the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba.Microsoft was required to make this information available to competitors as part of the European Commission March 24th 2004 Decision in the antitrust lawsuit".

Of note is that the PFIF will make a one-time payment of 10000€ to Microsoft, and that the documentation will be kept internal by the PFIF. But the Samba developers will be able to use what they learn from the documentation in Free Software implementations without further restriction.

Although Samba did very well without any access to Protocol documentation, doing even better than Microsoft's products in some tests, this will help the project to closely follow the changes in Windows protocols.

Samba also published an history of this case.

This paper, published by Microsoft, explains how to use Linux to recover data from a computer on which Windows refuses to start.

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure has issued a communication about Microsoft's agreement with the European Commission, arguing that Microsoft is actually winning, as it got the green light to monetize its software patents, which have repeatedly rejected by the European parliament.

This communication joins other thoughtful texts on the web.

Microsoft's Virtual Machine Additions for Linux are "designed to improve the usability and interoperability of running qualified Linux operating systems as guests or virtual machines of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1". It improves guest and host synchronisation ( time synchronisation, heartbeat generation, and coordinated shutdown), mouse and display drivers, as well as the SCSI hard drive emulation. Several versions of Suse but also RedHat distributions are supported, in standard and enterprise versions.

Source: VMBlog