So today I got an email from SourceForge, asking me to vote in their Community Choice Award for best open source software in various categories. Apart from the usual Best Project for the Enterprise or Best Project for Multimedia, they also have categories for Most Likely to Be Accused of Patent Violation (ReactOS is my choice here) or Most Likely to Get Users Sued (the various file sharing programs are the immidiate suspects here).

I voted in categories that had software I had some experience with, which was about half the categories. Anyway, I was surprised to see that the primary sponsor for this whole thing is no other than Microsoft. Yes, the one you are least likely to think of when it comes to open source. Their logo was linked to http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/, which contains the words "open source" more times than I could think possible on one page for a microsoft.com site.

Which reminds me, about two weeks ago, just before my machine crashed , I had a meeting with Amit Cohen from Microsoft-Israel. He invited me, as an open source developer and advocate, to open a blog at blogs.microsoft.co.il. So now that I have some time again I registered myself there, and if it hadn't needed approval, this post might have been posted there.