How does Microsoft benefit?
The company is improving interaction wioth products in an existing markets, as well as ingratiating itself with the developers working in those markets. Both can contrivute to sales which would otherwise not be made.
How does Microsoft lose from such efforts?
The loss would be in sales. Even helping Apache, the distant second in the Fortune 1000 market, needn't reduce sales. To have that effect, Apache would have to work as well as IIS with other Microsoft products and IIS would have to be separately priced and prohibitively expensive.
The EC's demand for protocols may have taught the company a lesson. The anti-trust case and penalties did not prevent Microsoft from at least doubling its share of the market in question, becoming predominant. It is possible to reveal (some) protocols and still gain revenue.
I suspect Microsoft examines individual situations, and gives away only that which is unlikely to be damaging and in fact helpful.
Just don't expect Microsoft to make competition in the company's home markets easier.
Like Dana, I was surprised to hear of Microsoft’s decision to become a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, announced at OSCON late last week.
It wasn’t the only announcement. The Redmond, Wash based Windows giant also shared that it would make a contribution to the PHP community’s ADOdb project — which will expand support for Microsoft SQL Server. This will enable customers to deploy more PHP applications on Microsoft’s database.
What else? Microsoft pledged to extend its Open Specification promise to open up more than 150 additional protocols in Windows Server, the .NET framework and other products.
Microsoft also announced a series of IronRuby updates. These include plans to ship the Ruby libraries implemented in the Ruby programming language with the IronRuby distribution and participate in the RubySpec project.
It’s not clear if Microsoft would have taken these steps if chairman and co-founder Bill Gates was still around. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that Microsoft’s increasing participation in such projects is a big win for the open source community and for its customers.
