The word "Microsoft" appears 12 times in this press release.
I always thought Microsoft would end up acquiring Red Hat, but IBM did it instead. Now I think they'll acquire Canonical. I think it's only a matter of time before we'll have a Microsoft Linux.
Microsoft's linux platforms presently run mostly on Ubuntu. You're right that one way out of that dependency would be to buy Canonical. They chose to make their own top level Linux distro instead.
I half suspect Microsoft was bidding for Red Hat, and potentially that provoked IBM into action. It's just a theory, but Red Hat for many years was setup to avoid hostile takeovers from the likes of IBM with so called poison pill stocks or whatever.
to be fair and try to dismiss your comment, it does seem the word Microsoft has been associated a lot with opensource companies and technologies lately.
To give MS credit, they are _much_ more friendly to open source than I ever believed they could be. I think the popularity of Linux and Mac for web/cloud development (which is almost entirely based around open source code) more or less forced their hand.
It’s a shock to me as well. I do think this direction leads to more revenue for them long term though. Clearly the Windows desktop isn’t quite enough for their future plans so they’ve got to play nice with emerging platforms, or something. (Sounds more like 2013 logic but you get the idea…)
I always thought Microsoft would end up acquiring Red Hat, but IBM did it instead. Now I think they'll acquire Canonical. I think it's only a matter of time before we'll have a Microsoft Linux.