I plan to live forever. So far, so good.

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%.

Source: www.computerweekly.com