The commercial pressures exerted by Microsoft to maintain its monopoly are legendary, but don’t often make the light of day – fear of upsetting a major advertiser, fear of losing advantageous contractual terms, the iniquitous use of non-disclosure agreements, etc. takes care of that.

So all credit to PC Pro Magazine for breaking the Microsoft omerta and revealing the following nugget:

There can be no doubt that Microsoft is afraid of the open-source movement. Last month, as part of the conditions for allowing us to include Office 2007 on the cover disc, Microsoft Corp – in many ways a company distinct from the far cuddlier and more approachable Microsoft UK – wouldn’t allow us to put any open-source software onto the same disc … For instance, Microsoft specifically named OpenOffice.org as a program we couldn’t include on the cover disc.

So, while the OpenOffice.org community encourage people to test drive OpenOffice.org with their Keep the Car campaign, Microsoft are afraid even to share a CD with their open-source rival.

Users of office software may draw their own conclusions

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 12:32 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.