[Gllug] Microsoft was distributing Ubuntu

[John G Walker]

On Mon, 25 Jun 2007 12:45:14 +0100 Richard Jones <rich at annexia.org>
wrote:

> > This is the bit that always puzzles me. Why haven't Microsoft
> > attempted to muscle in on Linux? On the face of it, it would seem
> > to be an obvious thing for them to do.  
> 
> They've tried to muscle Linux out of the way, by proxy (see SCO) and
> now directly (see current patent FUD).  The Halloween documents[1] 10
> years ago were the blueprint for this and they've been fairly
> faithfully following the plan ever since.
> 
> They wouldn't muscle _in_ on Linux because the license prevents them
> from embracing and extended the code, and because there is no way that
> Microsoft could turn around the company and become a pure support
> organisation which could compete with the likes of IBM, Red Hat, etc.
> Their culture is proprietary, in-house, Windows, uncooperative.  It's
> almost directly the opposite of what is needed to collaborate with
> upstream developers to build supportable solutions in a Unix culture.

I appreciate this. But, given that some people are using Linux, I would
have thought that MS could have increased their revenue by selling
their own distro and including Linux versions of MS applications
therein.

Now, I also appreciate that they are not into increasing revenue.
They're into increasing profit, which is not the same thing. And I
assume that they've done their sums and worked out that they wouldn't
increase profits by producing Linux versions of their programs.

It's just that I'd quite like to know something about these sums. How
did they work this out?

I suppose i can live without knowing the details, but still...

-- 
 All the best,
 John
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