Last night while looking at msfn.org to put in my vote for Firefox on their poll, I noticed that the site was based on PHP, an Open Source language. Microsoft usually puts down anything with a GPL license at what seems to be every opportunity, so it seemed odd that a site for Microsoft developers runs on PHP, even if it isn’t’ an official Microsoft site. Then today Cnet put out an article speculating that MSN might be running on PHP and MySQL as well. The screenshot they show as possible evidence, shows the Brazil MSN with a PHP/MySQL error message displayed. I don’t actually think the image is anything but a fraud, because Netcraft shows that server as running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 IIS/6.0 and yet the file paths in the error messages seem to be Unix paths not Windows. Still, there has been long speculation that for a long time some Microsoft servers (like Hotmail) were running BSD and not Windows on the back end, so who really knows?
