Linux and Microsoft together? Oh no!

Who cares. This whole debate for years now of who sucks and whatever is lame, old, stale, and just plain gay. Personally, it's just cool what these OSes can do. Coming from the age of PDP-11s, Atari 800s (my all-time favorite!), et al, today's operating systems are super-kill-dog. I think people should be focusing more on shaping their platforms to do what they want via the applications they run on it. I think XP is a solid OS, and great to develop on. Visual Studio is amazing. Eclipse is amazing. It's all just so...amazing...ahhh...

Anyway, 95% of my XP loads run open source software I've found out there. 7-zip: perfect archiving utility. Notepad++: text editor on 2.5 pounds of steroids. CDBurnerXP Pro: purty good burning program (although I wish there was a rock-solid ISO maker out there; mkisofs works extremely well, except I've had problems ISO-ing DVDs). OpenOffice, Eclipse, etc...And now with VirtualPC being free, I have my OS go through a M0n0wall VPC image. Better than ZoneAlarm by a long shot.

It looks like the bulk of this collaboration is on virtualization, xml document standards, and Exchange compatability. Good (especially for the Exchange stuff). Other vendors have already been developing "commercial" (i.e. $$$ + EULA) software for Linux. If Microsoft and Novell collaborate to make their systems work more transparently together, great. As long as it's free and I can look at that code. And boy would Microsoft earn big points out there for that.

A friend of mine went to a conference in DC a couple weeks back, and many of the attendees he talked to there said that for government work, they steer away from Microsoft simply because the only way they can be sure of their security is open architecture. If this collaboration between Microsoft and Novell is in any way hindered by licensing / closed-source issues, it's a boondoggle and has an exponentally increased chance of either putting a 0-inch dent in the continuation of open source development, or killing Novell's Suse as a Linux OS leader where there's a gazillion distros waiting to be the next top dog. Like FreeBSD. Viva la BSD, beeyatch!

PS: If any of you out there have gotten Xen to run on FreeBSD, comment or something and let me know how you did it!

~simon