By Justin Silverton

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that they have taken an interest in the php language and would be working closely with the Zend corporation to make it more efficient and scalable on the windows platform.

Now, Microsoft has announced that they will also co-develop a version of linux with Novell (based on the SUSE distribution).

In a Recent Article from InfoWorld:

“Microsoft will offer sales support for Suse Linux and will co-develop with Novell in the areas of virtualization, Web services management, and document format compatibility between Microsoft Office and Open Office. The collaboration will make it easier for users to run both Suse Linux and Microsoft Windows on their computers.”

At first glance, this sounds like a great thing. Microsoft will now be supporting the open source community. This could bring: better driver support, interoperability with office formats (and other proprietary formats), and even more wide-spread usage at the enterprise level (large companies might see Microsoft as a more viable support option).

We also might see something I have been wanting for awhile now: A good desktop distribution. Linux works great in a server environment, but I have had many issues when attempting to use it as a desktop machine (driver support..or the lack of is one of the biggest problems).

The downside of this new interest is the fact that Microsoft is still a corporation. A corporation has only one thing in mind: making money. One of the main objectives here is to get back the marketshare that is slowly being lost to linux servers. Looking at their past history (Steve Ballmer once said that the GNU is a “viral license”) leads me to believe that they will try anything in their power to control the one thing they cannot buy.