My long-time friend and colleague Mary Jo Foley recently talked with Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s director of platform technology strategy at the company’s Open Source Software Lab. The subject of their conversation was: “Exactly what it is Microsoft is trying to do with open-source software anyway?”
The answer? “Our focus is getting OSS [Open-Source Software] on top of Windows.” Or, as Mary Jo aptly put it, “WAMP” (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) instead of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl).
The point is that Microsoft, so long as it has to put up with open-source programs, wants to turn OSS into just another Windows software stack. Linux, well, that’s another matter entirely.
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