So Microsoft, instead of just viewing Open Source as a cancer, is finally focusing on competing with it.

About time. However, it’s still too little too late. Sure, they can compete with IBM, Novell/SuSE, Red Hat, and other companies, but the nice thing about Linux and Open Source is they will never go away. MS can turn it into a business war all they want, but there will always be an ideology behind it.

Even if by some miracle IBM announced bankruptcy tomorrow, there will still be thousands (tens of thousands?) of coders all around the world still contributing to Linux and the many projects surrounding it, ranging from Apache to Samba. And let’s not forget associated projects like PHP, Perl, MySQL, etc.

Larger companies may sweat not having an IBM or Novell to rely on for support, but here at my ISP, Linux definitely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. We have FreeBSD and Linux running on a handful of our servers, and I’m giving serious thought to implementing one or the other in place of our two Win2K Server boxes. We don’t have massive processing demands or a need for continual support, so why pay the licensing fees for the upgrade? Hardware support is costly enough.