A senior Microsoft executive has written to the Mozilla
organisation offering support to get its open source Firefox
browser and Thunderbird e-mail client to run on the forthcoming
Windows Vista operating system.
Sam Ramji, director of Microsoft’s open source software lab,
also posted his offer to the Mozilla development planning
group.
He offered “spaces set aside” at Microsoft’s Windows Vista
Readiness ISV Lab – a four day event giving one to one access to
Vista product developers. “In the past the company has only invited
commercial software developers to these labs,” Ramji said.
“I'm committed to evolving our thinking beyond commercial
companies to include open source projects, so I went to the
non-trivial effort of getting slots for non-commercial open source
projects.”
The offer comes as figures from industry analysts show Firefox
continuing to gain ground on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.
Firefox now has nearly 14% of market, with Internet Explorer’s
share shrinking to 76%.
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