Xandros Cozys Up Closer to Microsoft
This post was published 2 years 7 months 5 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.Xandros and Microsoft have entered a licensing agreement to allow Xandros to interface with Microsoft’s Exchange server via ActiveSync. Does this mean that Microsoft is becoming more open source friendly.
Microsoft and Xandros first announced a pact to make their products more interoperable in June during Microsoft’s annual TechEd conference. Microsoft also agreed not to sue Xandros users for patent-infringement. Microsoft claimed earlier this year that Linux violates more than 230 patents it holds.
Microsoft has been collecting Linux vendors like Novell and Xandros as alliance partners in what some see as an effort to appear more friendly to the open-source OS, which is a strong competitor to its Windows Server OS. For their part, Linux vendors want to protect their customers from any potential patent-infringement claims from Microsoft. And Xandros, being one of the less successful Linux vendors, gains a competitive advantage by teaming up with the software giant.
It would be crazy for Microsoft not to be cooperative with Linux distributors. Partnerships like this help keep monopoly regulators at bay, and only can bolster sales for Microsoft. The more clients that Microsoft allows to connect to their software the more licenses they can sell. It’s not open source friendly, Its a no brainer to boost sales!
The other interesting part of this particular vendor is that they had a partnership with a company called scalix (http://www.scalix.com/). Scalix develops an open source competitor to Exchange, which runs on the linux platform. I have no doubt this played into the decision by microsoft, because scalix on the xandros platform is incredibly easy to set up – you just install the OS and you have it – which makes it incredibly viable in the market, especially at a much lower cost than a windows server / exchange setup and on a much better server platform.
The especially interesting part is that xandros just fully bought out scalix, and now I’m wondering what the status of that is going to be…luckily zimbra is still out there, and providing an awesome linux alternative.