We’ve the seen the first few small skirmishes in the Linux war. The SCO conscripts were sent on the first charge. SCO suing IBM for ten billion dollars was first little probe of the defenses. I have been watching for years now on Groklaw (at least it seems like it). SCO is in full retreat now, and IBM is making the final push through the center of its line. It now makes sense that the next major offensive is launched by any force that is warring with Linux.
Just read a good piece from www.pcmag.com by John Dvorak “Is Microsoft Going to Start a Linux War?” He makes some good points as to what could happen next.
“With a shim, Microsoft could possibly do the following: Take a Linux distro, say SUSE; then create a shim that talks to the SUSE kernel. Publish the source code of the shim and what it does. Then take a proprietary Microsoft optimizer that lets various apps run on Linux perfectly with modifications to the Linux core—but that actually runs on the shim, not Linux. “
Uh ohh.. When you think about this, it makes a lot of sense, they are going hit linux where they are soft, the application space. With the above scenario, MS could run their applications on most linux distrubutions and keep their software applications closed source. (while in the meantime providing them a path to silently ditch their OS, and migrate to Linux) It will not be sudden, but will take years. There will many other little battles, but what is most important is that MS prevents any open source applications from gaining a toe-hold in the business world, and this would do it.
