The strangest news I've heard in a while was that Microsoft and JBoss agreed to collaborate in the development of future products. According to CNET they will still compete against each other in the Application server space but will work to ensure that future releases of products can co-exist peacefully together.

The benefit to JBoss is obvious to everyone. Who would not want to be approached by Microsoft with an opportunity to work together? JBoss says that a little over 50% of their entire install base is running on top of Windows based systems.

What Microsoft gets out of this arrangement is a little harder to understand. I remember using J++ back in the day, yes I wrote Java applications that could only run on a Wintel systems (painful as that might be to admit), and I remember the big controversy around Microsoft cutting off support for Java after the court battle with Sun MicroSystems. Now for there to be such a big turn around and for Microsoft to acknowledge the need to support an application server that is based on Java technology is a pretty big deal.

For those people not keeping score here could be a part of Micorsoft's motivation:

• During JavaOne 2005 it was announced that worldwide 14 million people are using Java as a programming language
• Within the past year Java surpassed COBOL as the most used programming language
• JBoss is an open source company and why not choose them for a partner ;-)
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