Embrace, Assimilate, Destroy

In the past months, Micro$oft as shifted from being extremely hostile to Open Source, to being very friendly to it. At first it came as a surprise, but now I can see the (possible) strategy they are following: embrace, assimilate, destroy. Call me anti-Micro$oft, but I refuse to believe in a company that has, for years, expressed their literal hate towards Open Source. This here is the latest move in that "embrace" part of the plan:

Open Specification Promise: Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.
...
Apache Software Foundation: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.

The open specification thingie is something that they have been playing with for a while now, but it still doesn't clarifies how future versions of Micro$oft code will be handled. It does cover some of the loopholes it had, so it IS a move in the right direction. The sponsorship to the ASF is less interesting, because it is just one of the many monetary contributions Micro$oft has made to the Open Source movement. One important thing about the contributions to the ASF, however, is the fact that they are doing their best to make Apache (the popular web server, and the flagship product of the ASF) work better in Windows than it does on, surprise, GNU/Linux. And here is where it all starts making sense. The point of all this "flattery" to the Open Source community might as well be only for the sake of establishing Windows as the best platform to work on, to make GNU/Linux lose all the ground it has gained so far. And when they are done with that, the killer blow:

PHP on IIS + SQL: Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications. The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team. ADOdb is licensed under the LGPL and BSD. This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last.

In other words, their ultimate goal is to make people stop using LAMP stacks (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) in favor of WISP stacks (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, PHP). And given their advantage over Open Source in terms of user base and raw amounts of money, I can see it happening in the near future.