Seeking to court input from an open source community wary of firms such as Microsoft, Sam Ramji, director of the company’s open source software lab, posted an open invitation to Mozilla on one of the group’s development discussion boards.
“I'm writing to see if you are open to some one-to-one support in getting Firefox and Thunderbird to run on Vista," Ramji said. “[Microsoft is] committed to evolving our thinking beyond commercial companies to include open source projects.”
Preempting doubts from the open source community that his offer was merely an effort to placate them, Ramji said that his role in Vista is the "nontrivial effort of getting slots for noncommercial open source projects.”
According to a report by CNET, the open source community has expressed a mixed reaction, with some posts proclaiming excitement and others projecting skepticism.
Firefox runs on existing Windows, Linux and Macintosh operating systems.
According to tests conducted by ZDNet UK, Firefox also ran successfully on Vista beta 2. But, according to CNET, the beta version released to ZDNet UK does not include Microsoft’s Application Compatibility Toolkit, which tests more of the product than might be revealed during a normal test.
Mozilla said it was “too early to comment” on the Microsoft offer.
