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Beware when the Big Blue (Microsoft) guys from Redmond bring gifts to the table or when they put their leg to the door. It could spell disaster!

Sam Ramji, director of Microsoft's open source software lab, has offered help to get Firefox to work with the upcoming Vista operating system and he did this on a Mozilla development discussion group on Monday. Now that’s pretty scary since its not an official release on Microsoft’s own website. I wonder…

He wrote: "I'm writing to see if you are open to some 1:1 support in getting Firefox and Thunderbird to run on Vista." He also went on to say that Microsoft is "committed to evolving our thinking beyond commercial companies to include open source projects" in the Vista project.

Well the feedback is that the open source community are suspicious of Microsoft's motives but one enthusiast on the Ars Technica website said "ultimately… proprietary technologies will always get replaced by an industry-supported, open-standard alternative, hence the embrace of RSS, Open Source Lab, XML and royalty-free access to Open XML"

Does the Firefox development need a helping hand from good old MS when Firefox is running fine on existing Windows, Linux and Macintosh operating systems. If MS wants to have a hand messing in Firefox, then I’d say – Show me the $$