It is quite amazing (read as amusing) to see what Microsoft has been doing since Linux and Open Source has started becoming popular in computing community. During the starting phase nobody might have realized that Open Source drive would become such a success! It is well understood that Linux and Open Source has become threat to many proprietary software vendors - that's natural. I think success of Linux affects Sun (Sun Solaris and other Unix) more than Microsoft - till today. Microsoft still has a huge capture in the end user (especially non techie) segment on desktops and laptops - and Linux is not yet successful in these segments for various reasons. But why Microsoft has been after Linux and OSS since long?
Open source and Linux is a very positive attitude. It lets people share their creation with rest of world so that others not only get benefited but also can contribute on top of it. The world (and at least individual nations) have followed the same model so far in their development process - in Science, Philosophy, Art and Technology and any other direction one can think of. Linux and OSS follows no different philosophy than this. That's why we call it highly positive and can not be resisted by a group of people whose mind is limited to their own business profit.
As I mentioned above many companies are hampered by increasing popularity and strength of Linux and OSS community - Microsoft is not the only one and probably not even in the top list. But their attitude towards OSS and unnecessary attack on Linux and OSS is causing more harm (to Microsoft) than the harm caused by Linux and OSS itself.
I think it is high time for Microsoft to realize (I think they already do!) the potential of Linux and Open community and learn to co-exist amicably. Change of attitude will help Microsoft themselves. Linux and Open Source is now strong enough (and growing stronger each day) to tackle such attacks (like Microsoft's) in the future. Microsoft is becoming pretty lonely in this fight. Many of the major hardware and software vendors in Servers, Embedded devices, hand held devices have already changed their attitude towards Linux. Many started using OSS and supporting Linux along with their proprietary software.
It is pretty amazing to see why supposedly big brains of Microsoft are not able move towards the right direction in this context. They are taking too long to show the correct response. May be they will take few more years before they start using open source or start releasing open source software :-). But surely one day they will. There is hardly any other choice here.
