Was it a May Day diatribe or a mayday plea? This column
maintains the latter, and says anybody who got too worked up about
Mr. Mundie’s comments last week hasn’t been paying very good
attention to what Redmond has been saying all along.
I can’t see why everyone’s getting tied up in knots.
Mundie’s comments are a simple and logical extension of Microsoft’s
“embrace and extend” position on open source–a position that
existed even before the Halloween document came into public view in
1998. The attempts to call attention to Linux forking and to the
fact that potential security holes are open for anyone to see
aren’t anything new either. Then there’s the requisite “be scared
of the GPL” talk that had been a part of Microsoft’s strategy for
some time before Mundie spoke.