As you probably have heard or read about by now Microsoft has made another deal with another open source company. This time Linspire has signed a deal with Microsoft to license VOIP and Windows proprietary media formats and true type fonts. My question is why? There is no need as those technologies are already in the open source world.

For companies like Microsoft and Mozilla, Safari coming to Windows means that one more competitor will be thrown into the Windows browser battlefield. While neither company has expressed dismay with Apple's decision to put Safari on Windows, on Monday executives from both Microsoft and Mozilla expressed a lack of concern for their new (Windows) foe.

"Two Slashdot posts and a long meeting with Microsoft really got me to thinking about whether Microsoft really likes, or doesn’t like, the new GPL version and how its strategy, with regard to open source in general, has been changing over the past few years."

Microsoft and Linux distributor Xandros on June 4 signed a broad set of collaboration and patent agreements that reminded many of the November 2006 Microsoft/Novell partnership. What do analysts and other Linux vendors think this new deal means for Linux?

Microsoft’s hire of Tom Hanrahan (right), formerly director of engineering for the Linux Foundation (and before that of the OSDL, one of its predecessors) says a lot about the company’s true open source situation.

Nearly a decade after the government began its landmark effort to break up Microsoft, the Bush administration has sharply changed course by repeatedly defending the company both in the United States and abroad against accusations of anticompetitive conduct, including the recent rejection of a complaint by Google.

Bill Gates wrote, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” Mr. Gates worried that “some large company will patent some obvious thing” and use the patent to “take as much of our profits as they want.”