Microsoft and Open Source

I attend this session to see if Microsoft had changed its view on Open Source, unfortunately they hadn't. I tried to pre-empt the usual answer that as far as .NET is concerned, they've submitted C# and the CLI to EMEA as a standard and that Immitation is the best form of flattery but they didn't come back with much else.

The view seemed to be that they are happy to have these things go on, providing its not affecting their IPR but they won't be looking at .NET CLR implementations on anything other than Windows. The view was it devalued the framework, allowing "rogue" features to be included and it no longer became a dependable runtime - which I can understand - but as I said, surely if its running across multiple platforms and a 'core' functionality is ensured, then thats a good thing.

There are a few initialised going on and www.microsoft.com/sharedsource is one link, as is the other - Sourceforge.