Russian Principal: Case Dismissed, Feb 16, 2007

Today, a Russian judge dismissed the Microsoft piracy case against school principal Alexander Ponosov.

If Microsoft really wants credit and credibility in the open source world, it needs to stop the squeamishness and show good faith. Why not let bygones be bygones and just let the whole Halloween documents issue drop? And why not submit a couple of Shared Source licenses for OSI approval, just to see what happens?

Microsoft could have and should have done its own version of Linux. It could have bought a Linux distro vendor or just christened some branch of Windows (with some Unix-compatibility add-ons) as Microsoft Linux. By doing this, Microsoft could have thrown a real monkey wrench into Linux companies' plans.

Ward Cunningham, one of Microsoft's high-profile hires, is leaving the Redmond software company to join the open-source tool group, The Eclipse Foundation.

The vice chairman and open-source backer offers his two cents on the Ximian deal, Novell's future relationship with Microsoft and the latest SCO skirmish.

Microsoft also is dissecting what makes Linux tick in its own Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC). The EEC is focused primarily on helping Microsoft customers with deployments of new Microsoft software. But Microsoft also has built a simulated Linux environment at the EEC, Taylor says, where Microsoft developers can experiment with open-source operating systems, firewalls, scripting environments and the like.

"It was a great learning experience for us," Taylor says. And the lab is helping Microsoft analyze areas where open source is weak and where Microsoft should redouble its efforts—such as in single-sign-on technology, Taylor says.

"We ... see Linux being heavily used in the academic environment and increasingly being evaluated by government, particularly overseas," acknowledged Microsoft chief financial officer John Connors in an investment conference speech in June. "In certain geographies of the world there is a notion — we think misguided — that you build a software industry on things that are free. That's not likely to happen in our view from an economic perspective, but that is a view in certain geographies that we're working hard to get the story out about how the commercial software industry works.