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And with the exception of pirated copies of the Window operating system there is no association between "free" and Windows. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that Microsoft will ever diverge from its current business and development models in the future, by making an open source Windows available for free.

Still, end users can find both Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2 for free over at Microsoft, the trick is just to know what you are looking for and, then, how to manage the offerings. And do not make the mistake of thinking that it is a handout, because that is not the case. Just bear with me, and I'll explain as we go along. But at this point, you have to know that both the latest Windows client and its predecessor are up for grabs straight from Microsoft as free downloads. And no, it doesn't sound too good to be true, although there is a catch, obviously.

There are a number of factors that together contribute to the free Vista and XP SP2 releases. First off, there was the Internet Explorer 7 release in October 2006. The next step in the evolution of Internet Explorer from IE6 broke the web, but just a tad, mainly because of added CSS support. This happened in particular due to a little something something Microsoft had previously implemented in Internet Explorer 6 in order to ensure compatibility, the all-too-familiar DOCTYPE switch used by web developers, to enable different modes of browser behavior.

Because IE6 is virtually a handicapped browser, it took a lot of tweaking on the web developers end to make the same website render properly in Internet Explorer 6 as well as in Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc., part of the work involved the DOCTYPE switch. When IE7 was released it diverged from the model of IE6, just enough to break the webpages that were tailored to the previous release of the browser.

It can't really be said that Microsoft made amends, but having its Virtual PC 2007 virtualization solution made available for free, the company did debut an initiative designed to atone for the problems faced by web developers. It essentially started, timidly enough, to offer Windows XP SP2 with Internet Explorer 6 as a virtual hard disk image available for free.

The offerings associated with the Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image download grew over time, adding a copy of XP SP2 plus IE7. Microsoft made a tradition out of the continuous releases of IE Application Compatibility VPC images throughout the past year, and the lineup just keeps getting better and better.

And as a matter of fact, it just did with the launch of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. Now, with IE8 Microsoft plans to deliver full support for CSS 2.1, but there are also changes coming to DOM, AJAX, as well as support for HTML 5, and the setting of the Standards Mode as the default rendering mode of the browser. In translation... IE8 will break the web. Microsoft is not aiming to reduce the impact that IE8 will have on the websites built exclusively for IE6 and IE7.