They were also a major sponsor of OSCON, above, e.g., Google and Sun. http://en....

unalone · on July 26, 2008

Hey. Microsoft is a lot of nasty things but it's not stupid. It doesn't compete needlessly, not always, and it knows a good thing when it sees it.

deepster · on July 26, 2008

While MSFT might wage war against Open Source, they recognize it's a deep pool of talent to recruit from.

Now if they could hire away the key Apache developers, they would in a heartbeat. They did it to Borland in the 90's. That's why Ballmer was tossing around chairs, b/c he saw Google using the very same strategy against him.

At the end of the day Money talks!

gruseom · on July 26, 2008

They did it to Borland in the 90's.

Indeed, and with huge consequences. Borland withered up and died (or the statistical equivalent), and MS got Heijlsberg who went on to make some of the few things they have that don't suck.