Duh, control the server market and control the net - and in turn everything utilizing the net in one way or another. And this spirit of cooperation by M$ with this shared source initiative is the M$ version of open-source? They'll share the source in order to gain the benefits that the Osource community has enjoyed, that being more minds and codes to improve a product. The difference being that it still belongs to M$ and they are the ones to ultimately benefit from Shared Source overall - enlist volunteers in thinly vailed Shared Source initiative that's really a twist of 3E (embrace, extend, extinquish), or as Mundie states: "customers aren't trying to buy the rights to produce [a] derivative..."In general, we're going to control that reintegration. We worry a lot about uniformity and avoiding fragmentation." But the fact that M$ would like to "Extinquish" Linux becomes evident in the statement: "It's 'a nice PR story for Microsoft to talk about the possibilities about .Net on Linux,' he said. 'It is true that Linux can participate in those .Net services, but don't expect Microsoft to provide any incentive or anything else that would make that possible'." Then the soft soap about competition benefiting the consumer. Yes, competition benefits the consumer, but M$ will only seek to ultimately benefit its bottom line and its stock holders. The consumer is only a vehicle to be used to this end and being that Linux gets in the way of M$' plans to optimize this strategy it can only be assumed that once M$ believes that they have an advantage and that the Linux/Osource threat has been handled you can expect higher prices for less quality - as usual. Just MHO, Curtis On Tuesday 19 June 2001 12:08 pm, Fred A. Miller wrote:

Microsoft ready for open source threat

"The real reason for MS hostility? Real fear Now we get it. There's a motive behind what is, by all appearances, Microsoft's carefully orchestrated effort to discredit open-source software. The growing popularity of the movement's poster child--namely the Linux operating system--poses a real threat to Microsoft's ambitions to become the dominant OS in the server market. That, right there, is enough of a reason. But there's more: Any setbacks Microsoft suffers in servers also stands as a setback to its .Net software-as-a-service strategy and the so-called Hailstorm platform on which it's being built."

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5092795,00.html