Microsoft has supported competitors before, this was cited by MS during the anti-trust trials as an example of their benevolence. Cynics would claim it as MS having enough investment capital to burn that they can easily afford to spend $100m on PR exercises.

Given the current MS attitudes, I think you're right - the anti open source faction has gained control, I don't expect their support for Activestate to continue.

I suspect that currently MS is quietly confident that the anti-trust suit will be quashed by the Bush admin. So we can expect lots more aggressive moves like this - makes sense, open source is now their biggest competitor.

Overall I'd say this will hurt Microsoft, more than it will hurt open source. It's harder to quash a community of individuals than it is a few shareholders and directors. Plus attacking open source will build up its credibility... at least they're not laughing at us any more.

"The future will be better tomorrow."

Plus you get exposed to radicals who honestly think it is OK to develop good software and just let people use it for free, which makes you more inclined to make decisions that avoid contributing to the Microsoft gravy train.

It is ironic that one of the federal government's complaints against Microsoft was that it gave IE away for free and thus prevented its competitor Netscape from charging for an inferior product. Apparently, Microsoft is always wrong. It is wrong if it gives its stuff away (IE) when others charge, and it is wrong if it charges for its stuff (Windows) when others give it away.

They developed software that was better than the competition (Netscape) and they gave it away for free.

IE was free in the sense that the transmission in my car was free. Sure I never got an itemized list that said
Transmission: $579.89
but you can bet I paid for it.

Netscape consultant Robert Bork claimed it was free. That was the basis for the alleged "predatory pricing" claim that Bork and Netscape made. If IE was not free then the predatory pricing claim becomes even more bogus.

IE is in fact free, because I can upgrade it without charge, delete it and reload it and so on.

Your conclusion is off target due to a flawed premise. Microsoft was accused of using it's OS monopoly to unfairly compete in a market dependent on that OS. Regardless of the quality of the software or its price, that kind of control over markets is harmful and illegal.

Robert Bork, a lawyer for Netscape, alleged that Microsoft's act of giving away its IE browser constituted "predatory pricing." Bork's accusation that giving a browser away is predatory is in addition to Bork's accusation that Microsoft illegally bound its IE browser to the Windows OS.

Bork's argument was that it costs money to develop a browser, and Netscape had the right to pass these development costs on to consumers, but Netscape was prevented from doing so by Microsoft's predatory pricing policy of giving away its browser for free at below the cost of developing it.

The act of giving away a browser, according to Bork, harms competition by preventing Netscape and others from commercially developing browsers.

I found it incredible that a person who called himself a conservative and pretented to oppose government regulation would make these arguments. "Predatory pricing" to give away software? Are Red Hat and Mandrake predatory for giving away their products on their servers? How about Larry Wall? He gave away Perl when Microsoft charged for Visual Basic. Is Larry Wall predatory?

I found Bork to be a fatuous idiot. He definitely claimed that it was illegal for Microsoft to give away IE, and that this act of "predatory pricing" harmed Netscape, requiring yet more government intervention advocated by the supposedly "conservative" Robert Bork.

I found Microsoft's arguments on this matter contra Bork to be completely convincing. You can find their response to Bork here. It says:

Perhaps the most remarkable policy pirouette by the 1998 Bork is his assertion that Microsoft deserves to be condemned because it has engaged in predatory price-cutting by giving Internet Explorer away for free. However, as the 1978 Bork would have understood, in light of the circumstances, "giving away" web browsing software is rational and procompetitive. Indeed, the 1978 Bork wrote, "predatory price-cutting is most unlikely to exist and . . . attempts to outlaw it are likely to harm consumers more than would abandoning the effort."