Firefox Developers Invited To Microsoft

Sam Ramji of Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab extended an invitation to Mozilla’s Firefox development team to spend some time at Redmond to receive Vista support for the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email program.

     “Why don’t we just invite them to dinner and massacre them all when they’re drunk?”
     “You heard the man. There’s seven hundred thousand of them.”
     “Ah? So it’s have to be something simple with pasta, then.”
— Ghenghiz Cohen and the Silver Horde discuss time-honored barbarian tactics, “Interesting Times” by Terry Pratchett

Quite a few commenters on the Ars Technica story about Microsoft inviting Mozilla’s developers to spend four days in Redmond contributed an assortment of comments on the humorous lines of “It’s a trap!”

Microsoft does invite software developers, usually commercial ones, to these lab sessions. Rajmi’s post to the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup described what is in store for the Firefox team if they accept the invitation (which does not include mass mayhem or other threats):

I am the Director of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft, and I’m writing to see if you are open to some 1:1 support in getting Firefox and Thunderbird to run on Vista.

As part of my mission as an advocate for open source applications on Windows, I’ve gotten spaces set aside at the Windows Vista Readiness ISV Lab. In the past the company has only invited commercial software developers to these labs. 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.
Rajmi noted that four people would receive one to one support in a secure office space from Vista developers and support staff. The lab provides hardware and VPN access for those developers.

The invitation posted to the group also contained this opening, which showed Microsoft, or at least Rajmi, has a sense of humor about the browser wars:

I sent this invitation to staff@mozilla.org as well, but in case their spam filters are set to block @microsoft.com email addresses, I’m posting here.
If this is a legitimate invitation and the Firefox group accepts, it would provide some additional validation of Mozilla’s work. Despite being an open source project, Microsoft would be taking Firefox’s market share seriously enough to make sure Vista users who choose Firefox and Thunderbird have minimal issues getting that software to work on Microsoft’s long-delayed operating system.

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