Free software from Microsoft? This might be a dream – this monster from Redmond is not going to embrace the free software bandwagon. But its true! One of the latest offerings is the Security Essentials which provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. Other free offerings are Virtual PC, Powershell Pack, or Microsoft Maths
Even if Microsoft is offering free software, it is not GNU. Opensource users are given the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software as long as the original copyright remains on the redistributed software. IMHO, this move of Microsoft is just to show to the opensource community that it is providing free software.
Nevertheless, I just hope that Microsoft is sincere and not only use the opensource community to widen up its hold on the computing public.