Even though some believe that Microsoft's recent patent lawsuit against TomTom is a prelude to an all-out legal assault on Linux, that doesn't stop Bob Muglia, the company's president of Server and Tools Business, to look into the future and state that Microsoft's products will look more and more to open source software. In fact, he predicts most Microsoft products will have open source in them at some point.

Based on all the user feedback ignited by the Windows 7 beta, Microsoft has made a set of tweaks to the release candidate of Windows 7. The Engineering 7 weblog details 36 of those tweaks, in quite some detail actually. Let's take a look at some interesting ones.

Microsoft plans to release "something akin to" a netbook version of Windows, but for servers, not PCs, over the next month or two, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said on a call with members of the financial community on Tuesday. He said that although there is not high demand at the moment for netbook-like server hardware, declining prices in the server market make a low-cost OS an attractive option for customers. "We don't exactly have a netbook phenomenon, but if somebody can buy a $500 server, they're a little loathe to spend $500 for the server operating system that goes with it," Ballmer said. He described the software as a "low-cost, low-price, low-functionality Windows Server SKU" called "Foundation Edition," but did not offer more details.

Developers willing to dish out the $400 required for an unlocked Dev Phone 1 won't be happy to find that access to paid market applications has been disabled by Google. It was possibly done to sloppily patch up a loophole that supposedly gave users of the unlocked phone the ability to download all applications for free. What little information Google would give as to why they made this decision included, "These phones give developers of handset software full permissions to all aspects of the device... We aren't distributing copy protected applications to these phones in order to minimize unauthorized copy of the applications." What makes this more interesting is that, at least according to Engadget, an unlocked original G1 doesn't have this limitation. It's rather ironic that a developer using said phone won't be able to access his or her own paid app. Let's hope Google remedies this quickly as you never know when an angry mob of app-deprived developers will storm the Googleplex with torches and sporks.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that the first release candidates (without numerals) for Service Pack 2 for both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 will be released to the general public for testing next week. This after private testers with the MSDN and TechNet services receive their copies first.

The UK Government has said it will accelerate the use of open source software in public services. Open source software will be adopted "when it delivers best value for money", the government said. It added that public services should where possible avoid being "locked into proprietary software". Kroc says: Very welcome, but let's believe it when we see it, the UK is famous for failed IT projects. You can start by removing the DRM from iPlayer.