Accepting the money from Microsoft would, in itself, do not harm. But Microsoft typically demands a price for its sponsorship, a price that implies a change in the nature of the event. The price might be, let someone from Microsoft give a speech. The price might be, don’t say that proprietary software is evil. The price might be, present Microsoft sponsorship in a way that inhibits
you from denouncing Microsoft’s software as unethical.

After several months of discussion and speculation, the Microsoft-Yahoo buyout deal is apparently off. At least, that's what both Microsoft and Yahoo announced over the weekend. There is some speculation that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made his announcement in order to topple Yahoo's share price, in order to make another offer at a lower price.

Microsoft must really love open source and want to see it succeed. Recently, Microsoft's open-source team lead, Sam Ramji, urged open-source vendors not to compete with Microsoft on price, but instead focus on "value."

When people think about adopting an Open Source solution, the first factor that comes to mind is the price: it is usually cheaper than proprietary alternatives. What a lot of people fail to consider is that there are a lot of other advantages to Open Source that can be much more important than the price factor. Let's have a look at a few of them...

We all know there are plenty of reasons to be in favor of open source software. It increases personal freedom, it helps people become better developers by sharing in the advances made by others, it provides many eyes to find bugs, it can respond more quickly to changing market demands, and so on. But what about reasons for corporations to get involved?

In a free market, over time, competition in the production of a commodity product will eliminate all profits. Bread-makers can sell their bread for enough money to cover the cost of the capital invested in the bakery, the cost of the flour, yeast, sugar, and water, the fuel needed for firing, and the salary of the baker. They can earn no more money than that.

As its ship date nears, the price is rising and the specs dropping on Asus's ultra-low-cost, flash-based Linux notebook, according to reports.

But what has all this got to do with the Nexus 7, a tablet just announced by Google at the Google I/O Conference in San Francisco? A connection could be in the price. However, it is just the price, but what you get for the price. At just US $199, the Nexus 7 looks like a good deal.

So what do you get for $199? Plenty!

Yahoo has finally offloaded its open source enterprise e-mail division, Zimbra, to VMware. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the sales price is believed to be far less than the US$350 million Yahoo paid for the company in September 2007. Kara Swisher at Boomtown reported that the sales price was "well below" the acquisition price, but didn't specify an amount.