Remember the other time I was agreeing with Matt Mullenweg’s prediction of Microsoft opening sources of Windows by 2017? Remeber I wrote a list of bullets with my reasons? Remember the first one being:
Neither Microsoft in general, no Bill Gates are stupid. They are very much profit oriented. Whatever makes them more money, they’ll go for it.
Well, here is another piece of news that confirms that.
Quote #1:
Novell was paid a whopping $355.6 million by Microsoft in return for software licensing
Quote #2:
Microsoft purchasing 70,000 licences for Novell’s SuSE Linux enterprise server, which accounts for much of what Microsoft was paying for. Microsoft, in turn, then sells these on to its customers.
Quote #3:
“This is to bridge the divide between open source and proprietary source software,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the time, in what amounted to an abrupt about-face on his part given his previous criticism of Linux. “It gives customers greater flexibility in ways they have certainly been demanding.”