I think Mary Jo Foley’s headline to her article on Microsoft’s submission of two projects to The Linux Clowncil – or whatever it is called, says it all: Pigs do fly!

Yeah, Linux pigs flew high this week!

While admirably pragmatic, the move was unprecedented, and for me, a whale of a shocker!

I had to sit down for this one, having see it in my Twitter timeline from Mary Jo and John Fontana as I exited a flight.

While a move like this was in the cards, what with the number of open source ‘gurus’ Microsoft has hired, the actual act was still a surprise.

Having taken some time to think about it, and looking at the products involved, I cannot help but think of VMWare as the beneficiary of Microsoft’s largesse.

While Microsoft has tried reach feature both parity with the VMWare products, and also delivering the management suite for virtualization, hooking into Linux remained somewhere where Hyper-V fell short.

With the pushers of Linux distros now able to write their own bloated interfaces into Windows Server, an off-the-shelf advantage of VMWare’s products over Hyper-V would be eliminated, leaving the products to stand on their own merits, and price. In this case, free, for Hyper-V.

So props to Microsoft for both submissions, and yeah, I’m off to my dentist for the pain caused by my jaw hitting the moving sidewalk.

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