“What's in a name?” some bloke in the sixteenth century once asked. As Microsoft knows, quite a lot. What you call something can have a major influence on how you think about it. So how Microsoft talks about free software is important – not least for the clues that it gives about its latest tactical move to defang the open source threat.

It's about time. Dell and HP have recently made very strong declarations of OS independence from Microsoft.

Microsoft's political sanctions provoke Cuba; President of Microsoft Russia temporarily becomes a journalist

Infosys helps Microsoft fight against the interests of the Indian people, but both companies are suffering together from an unstoppable power shift (from colonisation to freedom and independence)

No move by Microsoft to share information with its competitors will ever be taken at face value, and certainly yesterday's new Interoperability Principle will come under very close scrutiny. Is this the opening of the floodgates the EC has been demanding?

The BBC wants to put its shows on the Web, and made a deal with Microsoft for the technology required to do that. (That’s the Tardis, from Dr. Who, one of many fine BBC programs.)
This has the BBC in political hot water. Boingboing says it’s a DRM issue, but the country’s Open Source Business Consortium has complained to the EC, calling it an attempt to cement Microsoft’s monopoly:

Even before Linux was created, Microsoft has been scorned by members of the free-software community. Its products are decried as defective by design, and its sometimes questionable business practices as an obstacle to technological innovation. That’s old news. What amazes me is Apple’s track record for openness is even worse than Microsoft’s.

Microsoft plays to win. As a result, it seems to regard any legal means as justified, and sometimes even strays outside the law, as the US anti-trust case demonstrated. In the context of marketplace rough-and-tumble, such aggressiveness is perhaps acceptable, but in other realms, there may be serious collateral damage.

A large number of recent reports about Microsoft - Microsoft’s consumer-hostile and anti-GNU/Linux move still stand