The site’s been taken down at this point, but for the last few days, Microsoft was distributing Ubuntu Linux. The page on Microsoft’s Marketplace site was removed this morning, but there’s a Google cache of it here.
Microsoft has been courting the major Linux distributors for some time, hoping to get a chunk of a market they can’t touch, either through negotiation or the threat of legal force. They’re connected to the litigation that SCO tried to bring against the open-source community, and having failed that, they’re attempting to form alliances. So far, they’ve been largely rebuffed by the majors.
The folks in Redmond have had an uneasy relationship with Linux since its inception. Like Java and Netscape, Linux posed a very real threat to their monopoly. Unlike those products, however, nobody OWNS Linux. There’s no corporation to buy, sue or bully. Darl McBride was made infamous by trying to sue IBM as a proxy on a very shaky IP argument, but that failed to make a dent.
We know that MS has had Linux on the radar for some time. The question for them must be, “how the heck do we fight something that doesn’t have a central authority?” Failing that, they’ve fallen back to the old “extend and embrace” approach.
Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with them distributing a Linux distro, as long as they follow the GPL and honor the authors’ terms. It’s just really odd. Then again, it could be an employee’s idea of a practical joke. Anyhow, in case the Google cache disappears, here’s a screengrab:
