[conspire] first post in a while

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at gmail.com):

> it was good to see you folks again last night.  I haven't received an email
> from this list in a while, which makes me think that I must have
> accidentally unsubscribed somehow.

Even a quiet Mailman list sends out the monthly password-reminder mail
(unless configured otherwise by either the listadmin or individual
subscribers).

> I thought that it was a little bit odd that a Microsoft employee showed up
> last night.  It does seem as if Microsoft is trying to get closer to FOSS
> groups these days.

It's rather more likely that it was just an individual guy curious about
what's available around the Bay Area -- and he may also be a Linux user
himself.  

> Is Microsoft trying to learn how to do things in an open source fashion?

They've been picking and choosing what they want from open source for
quite a long time -- not to mention having entire divisions that
maintain major open source (including GPLed) codebases, such as
Microsoft Services for Unix (nee Interix).

> If so, all they would have to do is start open sourcing some more 
> significant code packages than their recent AIDS software and they
> would learn quickly.

They follow what they believe to be the dictates of their business
model.