Xandros, one of Microsoft's new best friends, has acquired its own buddy Scalix, the Linux e-mail, calendaring and messaging concern, a piece in Xandros' vision of having a complete Linux stack.

No price was given but it's clear Scalix needed to team up to go any further despite its 200,000 downloads. The pair now has a combined headcount of 100 people under Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos and Scalix has new resources.

It's going to be run as a Xandros subsidiary, which may insulate it against GPL retribution for Xandros' cozying up with the Evil Empire if things should come to that.

This way Xandros can also blithely promise that Scalix, whose brand will remain intact, will continue to support its rivals like Red Hat and Novell and create an appliance-style integrated messaging and calendaring product that works as easily on other Linuxes as it does on Xandros' distribution.

Xandros is also planning on adding some of the cross-platform pixie dust from its BridgeWays management tools to Scalix. Under their arrangement Microsoft and Xandros are supposed to link Xandros management with Microsoft's System Center.

Xandros imagines the widespread deployment of Linux-based Exchange alternatives that Windows folks can run.

Scalix' widgetry is the old abandoned HP-UX OpenMail, now the Scalix Collaboration Platform, and can dupe Outlook into thinking it's talking to Exchange, supporting Microsoft's messaging and calendaring.