By Charles Babcock (InformationWeek)
Microsoft is making a transition from being a company that values only proprietary software to one that recognizes that developers produce much unpatented, freely available open source code on Windows machines.
That doesn't mean Microsoft is an open source code company, but it does mean the hostility it has previously expressed is abating, said Sam Ramji, director of Microsoft's open source labs, during the keynote address of the second day of EclipseCon 2008, a meeting of users of the open source Eclipse programmers workbench. Ramji's labs ensure that key open source code can work with Windows technologies.
The open source labs director's keynote at EclipseCon 2008 was met with guarded optimism from open source developers.

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