First, Microsoft and Novell agreement gave to Microsoft the opportunity to be one of the biggest seller of Linux Operating System
A few months ago, Microsoft released the Microsoft Web Application Installer[0] that allowed limited amount of Windows users[1] to easily install widely used Open Source software. But strangely, the Readme file [2] contradicts the list[1] supported Operating Systems by saying: “…Windows Vista RTM is not supported due to the lack of FastCGI support for the version of IIS that ships with it…”.
I haven’t found a given explanation justifying the first selection: DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti CMS, osCommerce, phpBB, WordPress.
It seems that the first Microsoft choice doesn’t focus on developers but on users of open source software: The tools proposed are not exclusively manageable by high skilled administrators like OBM,
What are the reasons why Microsoft releases such installer? I found several good reasons:
- To increase the amount of PHP developers on Windows OS
- To increase the amount of ASP.NET developers by Open Source developers
- To increase the usage of Internet Information Services (IIS) by Open Source developers
But today, I used the same link to see what happened to this initiative and I can only say that it has been abandoned!
Microsoft is now providing a kind of LAMP stack of Microsoft Free solutions: .NET Framework, IIS and Extensions, SQL Server and Visual Web Developer.
That is a great idea for the Microsoft .NET developers but will once again prove that Microsoft has difficulties to find a breach into the open source community cohesion against them.
[0] http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebApplicationInstaller.aspx
[1] Supported Operating Systems are: Windows Vista RTM, Windows Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008
Abdelkrim... yes it's me 