When Sam Ramji, director of Microsoft’s open source software lab, posted a open letter some 14 hours back to Mozilla developers which wrote “see if you are open to some 1:1 support in getting Firefox and Thunderbird to run on Vista”, reactions were mixed. Some comments went as far as saying that this a big conspiracy & a trick to get run IE better. Another boggler went on to say that this is just a face-wash, something like a cheap publicity stunt. But shoving aside all the conspiracy theories, this marks a major shift in Microsoft policy, which till date had approached only commercial software developers for such collaborations/workshops. But in this case Firefox & Thunderbird are a major third party applications & are curial to the success of Microsoft Vista itself. Also on a geek level, like me ;-), this means that proprietary developers are reaching out for open source ppl so that the end experience can be better & in Microsoft’s case well, will sell more boxes of Windows vista.

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