Microsoft is pretty damned smart -- look at its forays into open source

Microsoft didn't get where it is today by being stupid.

And they've got a plan. From the Novell deal over intellectual property in Linux to the company's less legalistic initiatives, Microsoft has its hands in the free, open-source software pie, and it wants to dig even deeper.

Here are a few things to keep an eye on:

• CNet blogger Matt Asay writes about open source in The Open Road from a decidedly business-friendly perspective. He's pretty cozy with Microsoft. And he's all over the Sun/MySQL story. So when it comes to FOSS and the huge corporations involved in it, Matt has a lot of info that we would all do well to keep track of. Again, his apparent closeness to Microsoft might rub you the wrong way, but Matt's perspective is a very important one -- to me, anyway. From Red Hat to Sun, Google, MySQL, IBM and more. I find him less biased and way more realistic than a lot of writers out there. He did work for Novell, and now he's an executive at Alfresco, a company that bills itself as "the open-source alternative for enterprise content management," and if the point doesn't get across, there's this from the Alfresco Web site: "Our goal is to not only provide an open source offering but to surpass commercial offerings such as Documentum or Microsoft® SharePoint® in terms of features, functionality and benefits to the user community." He may be cozy with the huge companies that have interests, positive or negative, in open source, but somebody's gotta be on the inside.
• O'Reilly has a Microsoft-sponsored open-source page called Port 25. It's yet another page we would all do well to keep track of.
• And in the "Microsoft is smart" category, the company, along with Novell, is starting to push Moonlight, an open-source version of MS' Silverlight technology. Silverlight is seen as a competitor to Adobe's Flash, and an open-source version of the software, even if it originates from Microsoft, could gain some significant traction ... or it could prompt Adobe to open-source Flash. (If open-source Flash clone Gnash would work for me, I'd say there's another Flash-killer in our midst, but I need to see an app that actually shows a damn YouTube video ... or anything else).

The average Linux geek isn't going to buy any of this, but Linux geeks in the proverbial basement aren't who this is aimed at.

Instead, Microsoft wants to reach the free-spending people in the enterprise who are now using a mix of proprietary and FOSS solutions. Those IT managers want everything to work better -- and especially to work better together -- and they want to keep people happy, both their users and the people who sign off on their budgets.

In other FOSS news, Microsoft is also pushing Novell's SUSE Linux pretty hard ... in China, as I learned in this Matt Asay post.

I don't think we're going to see an open-source version of Windows anytime soon, but you never know what's going to happen with Microsoft.

So Port 25 and Matt Asay's The Open Road -- both things I need to add to the blogroll.