I bet no-one could have seen that coming. Only up until a couple of years ago Steve Balmer was foaming at the mouth and pronouncing the Open Source software was a ‘cancer of the software industry’. How times change. First came the Linux lab up at Redmond (who knows what it is called internally – the ‘lab of lost opportunities’?), and now Microsoft are embracing and helping out a serious competitor that develops one of the fastest growing Java Application Servers out there today.
Are Microsoft seeing the light, or are they realizing they can’t continue to run scared, that they have to starting playing in the same game to be able to keep up with changes in industry trends, for example, the widespread adoption of Open Source software in favor of expensive commercial software?