A group from the ETH technical institute in Zurich is working together with software giant Microsoft on a new kind of operating system called Barrelfish. The first results are now available under an open source license.

A Major threat to free/open operating systems.

t seems we’ve arrived upon Microsoft open source. In the last couple of years, whenever there was discussion of Microsoft’s open source projects and efforts such as CodePlex or Port25, there was typically the standard open source response: it’s not OSI-approved; it’s not real open source.

If you want to embrace open operating systems, quit the Microsoft monopoly or the Apple cult, Ubuntu is one of the most powerful operating systems based on the popular open source Linux kernel. It can do everything that the costly operating systems, only oh so much more, and for free!

In the old days, when Microsoft wanted to kill the Open Source Movement, O'Reilly's Open Source Convention was where you found true software revolutionaries. Great coders, they also were idealists who believed software was something you shared. Then a funny thing happened. Open source went mainstream.

One of the most interesting things to happen in the past couple of years, is Microsoft's embrace of Open Source. This means different things to various people I've spoken with at Microsoft.

In March, a Tweet from Powerset co-founder Barney Pell set the blogopshere a-burbling about the impending relaunch of Microsoft Live Search, and days later, screenshots of an internal beta - dubbed Kumo - rose to the surface of the web.

Using examples from the past week alone, we show and we explain in simple terms how Microsoft is taking over “Open Source” using former employees, existing partners, Novell staff, and naïve/careless people who allow this to happen

At the Linux Collaboration Summit, Microsoft platform strategist Sam Ramji faced some tough questions during a panel about operating systems. He argued that Microsoft doesn't oppose open source software and that collaboration with the open source software community represents an opportunity for Microsoft.