OSDL breaks silence on secret meetings with MS

Finally, now we can get to the juicy stuff. It seems that the OSDL has broken the silence about the ’secret meetings’ with Microsoft. To discover what was taking place, just read on below…

Microsoft approached the Open Source Development Lab about conducting a jointly-funded research study that would purportedly produce some facts-based analysis and comparisons of the two operating systems. Both Microsoft and the OSDL have been pretty tight-lipped about the discussions held during a LinuxWorld meeting between Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategy, Martin Taylor, and the OSDL’s CEO Stuart Cohen. However, late last week the OSDL forwarded us a statement from Cohen that explains some of the silence.

The statement reads:

Martin Taylor of Microsoft invited me to meet with him to discuss shared research and other topics at LinuxWorld and I accepted. Martin proposed that our meeting stay confidential in order to be as productive as possible and I agreed. When reporters contacted me about the meeting, I first asked Martin how he wanted us to respond to questions about a confidential conversation. He said he’s looking into how the press was notified and he promised to get back to me. As far as working with Microsoft on a study, I explained that Microsoft could probably find one negative line on Linux in a 100-page research report that it would spend $10 million marketing while ignoring the other 99 pages. Why would OSDL want to participate in that? [Read the rest]