Microsoft goes open source - ish

But the impossible seems to have happened: Microsoft is going open source.

Surely not. Is this the same Redmond-based behemoth that we've been loving to hate for so long? Has Washington State's famous Gap-clad plutocrat finally lost his monopolistic marbles? Bill, what are you thinking of?

It's OK, this is the same old Microsoft. Behind all the bull, there are the same old bully-boy tactics. Bill Gates did stoop to pick up the penguin - then dropped it on its head from a great height.

According to the New York Times, the man at the centre of the row is Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie.

Mundie is saying two things. Firstly, he's claiming that Microsoft has been open source for years - after a fashion. OK, they do allow people to play with parts of their source code. Maybe - but Mircosoft products aren't exactly free, which is one of the things people appreciate most about open source, and not all the code is available to one and all for collaborative development.

The rest of it is familiar penguin-bashing straight out of the Genghis Khan guide to business strategy.

Using Linux, says Mundie, puts your intellectual property rights at risk.

This from the company who recently told Hotmail users that anything sent through Hotmail instantly became the intellectual property of Microsoft. Awesome. If brass neck was all it took to sell operating systems, even my toaster would have one.

Microsoft's message is (again) more about marketing hype than genuine substance. So if you hadn't already guessed for yourselves, the company isn't really adopting open source at all - not in the true sense of the word anyway.