Microsoft contributes to Linux kernel
Eight years after Microsoft’s Operating System’s chief slams open-source software as un-american [Salon article], Microsoft has now contributed driver source code to the Linux kernel [Slashdot], with the same free software license as Linux.
I applaud Linus Torvald’s sensible, even kind, statements (as quoted at that slashdot article).
As a larger view of some of the challenges that free software has posed to Microsoft over time, have a look at this image from Wikipedia showing the browser rendering engine usage share since 1995. This shows Mosaic, the original browser (in green), and Netscape (in blue – and I think Netscape was based on Mosaic?), being walloped into nothingness by Internet Explorer starting around 1995 and ending the start of this century. The blue is Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. But the orange in the upper-right is Gecko, or Firefox’s rendering engine, which is an open-source descendant of Netscape. You can see that Firefox has taken a substantial chunk out of Microsoft’s share (through Internet Explorer) since the start of last decade. This is significant here because Firefox, like Linux, is open-source software.. but it doesn’t really provide an idea of the challenges Linux has presented Microsoft, I suppose. For some idea of that look at this web video from YouTube. I find it worshipful (I think that’s Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU operating system (components of it are in Lunux) – they’re deifying?) and slightly inaccessible, but it’s good history.
I’m submitting this post via Firefox running on GParted, a linux distribution I’m booting from a USB drive (set up with YUMI)to make changes to a dual-booting ancient machine running both Windows 98 and Windows XP. I brought up Firefox to look for “Mozilla’s Revenge”, which is a tool that replaces the windows 98 shell with the leaner 95 shell, as well as changing the boot screen to the following amusing image:
.. anyway that’s what I was searching for and I got side-tracked by some of the search results 
