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MS releases Linux FrontPage software

Ah, but it's not the app, it's a tipping of the hat to Apache

Outdated Microsoft nearly produces Linux applications, it would appear. Truffle-hound Mr Natural (Click for site) has found what appears to be a Linux version of FrontPage 4.0 lurking in the dungeons of the company's FTP site. But the Web is an awesome thing. Within the hour of The Register revealing Microsoft's secret activities in the Linux arena, news started coming in from readers who'd grabbed the file and investigated. And despite what the filename seems to imply, it's really only the server-side extensions to make FrontPage work with Apache, not a Linux implementation of FrontPage itself. The file is available here, and seems to have been posted quietly during a flurry of activity late last month. Mr Natural tells us that Microsoft has been up to this game for a while, having posted the same software for FrontPage 3.0 in December last year. It's not entirely obvious why Microsoft produced it, and considering that the company has so far failed to mention its existence to anyone, it'd be stretching it a bit to interpret the move as heralding a Redmond plunge into Linux support. One of our downloaders has thoughtfully sent us the readme and the licence agreement from the file, and you won't be surprised to learn there are no obvious open source breakthroughs in the latter. But even so, although we haven't got a move by MS into Linux apps yet, we certainly have got a tacit admission that Apache is too big to ignore. Later still, some killjoy informs us that FrontPage for Apache has been around since V2. So there goes that story, but it was fun while it lasted. As a peace offering our informant says: "Of course, that doesn't stop it from sucking badly - there are a number of basic implementation issues MS haven't bothered to work around, which leaves any half competent user able to drive a bus through your unix security holes." ®

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