Microsoft is acting in its best interests. By giving away that software, it means that those startups might use it rather than Linux. So, when they become larger, Microsoft gets money from them.<p>As someone who works at a non-profit, we get Microsoft stuff for next to nothing. It means that everyone who comes through our IT department gets familiar with MS stuff and prevents FOSS from getting as much of a foothold due to cost concerns.
From my experience I can tell that it's almost always possible to find better alternatives for Microsoft products and technologies. It seems like the only people who use MS stuff are those who don't care about what they have at hand.
well we all kinda saw this comin... the problem is that the people who read this site and others like it are not starting up companies based on .net and other microsoft technologies. companies nowadays start in the basement, garage, grad school project with zero funding and no software costs.<p>beyond the economy of it all there is the cool factor. microsoft is just not cool and all the cool kids play with the cool toys like ruby, python, erlang, memcached and on and on. this creates a neat little ecosystem of interconnected like minded people who chat with each other on irc and twitter.<p>the only coolish tech that i see from microsoft is silverlight... but guess what? the backend for any forward facing silverlight app will most likely be done with non microsoft tech :)
Why don't they let the computing industry grow?. $$$$ means everything to M$SFT. It irritated me so much with they offered XP back on the OPLC laptops. How lame. They want small children to use their lame software, so that the children don't even turn to the open source community. It sucks.
The title here is definitely misleading. Is Microsoft just giving away the GNU userland on cd? Now, that'd be newsworthy!<p>(/sarcasm. yes, I'm aware "free" here refers to the price of Microsoft's proprietary software)