GNU Apps On Windows?

There's a story circulating that Microsoft is going to provide a GNU compatible tool chain for Windows. This would in theory allow pretty much any *nix application to run on Windows with very little or no change.

I seriously doubt there's any truth in this mostly because it would create a horrible rift with their third party developers who'd they'd be throwing to the wolfs, but you never know, anythings possible. There is no technical reason it can't be done. Hell, from Microsoft's perspective, I'd think it would actually be easy. After all both MinGW and Cygwin already provide this functionality. In fact all they'd really have to do is provide a standard re-distributable C library and compiler.

Even though I think it's a bogus rumor I really do hope Microsoft does this. I've always thought it was the one thing they could do that would guarantee them another 25 years of market dominance. In fact it's the only thing I can think of that could buy them enough time to switch away from the "Software As A Product" business model.

They just better hope other people are more forgiving than I am. While I really want this to be true, it makes it easier for software I write to run on Windows, I have no personal interest in ever doing business with them again. Any vendor who doesn't always try and do the right thing for their customers is not some one I want to give money to.

After a decade of bullying everyone in the sandbox it's a bit hard to accept they really want to share there toys now and even worse for them I've come to realize most of the alternatives are significantly better.