The Microsoft code releases don't matter

I understand people being excited that Microsoft has used the GPL, but from a historical perspective, their behavior in these two cases are consistent with decades of previous behavior on the part of Microsoft.

Microsoft has pretty much always been willing to have their systems interact with systems from other vendors, as long as the Microsoft technology is in the dominant position.

For example, Active Directory is happy to provide LDAP services for address book or authentication functionality to other systems, but won't authenticate against another vendor's LDAP server.

Active Directory is also happy to provide Kerberos services to non-Windows systems, but getting Microsoft systems to work with someone else's Kerberos servers is much more difficult.

The Unix Services for Windows are the same game. They make it easier for you to use Unix servers in a Windows infrastructure, but they aren't nearly as useful if you want to use a Windows server in a Unix infrastructure.

This week's code releases, one making Linux work better under the Microsoft hypervisor, and the other making Moodle work with Live@edu, merely continue this trend. In the first case, they are helping Linux to work better in a Microsoft infrastructure, and in the second, they are helping Moodle to work better in a Microsoft infrastructure. Neither of these code releases help any Microsoft product work better in a non-Microsoft infrastructure.

What would be significant is if Microsoft changed their behavior and offered more support for running Microsoft products in a non-Microsoft environment. For example, code contributions to xen or kvm that improved the execution of Windows guests.

But that's not what happened. Microsoft released code that makes it easier for you to run a heterogeneous environment so long as it's being controlled by Microsoft technology. They still very much want to be in control of you and your infrastructure. These code releases are non-events.