No, Locus OS concept design, has apparently no association with MS.

The author claims:
"This interface was designed before iPhone 3.0, Palm Pre, Android etc, making the ideas original at the time :)"

Is the last sentence true at all?

"There's nothing easier" -- you say -- about packaging and deploying SQLite. "Just take the software with default settings and package as a shared lib plus SQLite shell".

It's not that simple.

The SQLite project is developed at impressive speed assuming complexity of the software. It's already part of many operating systems like OS X and Symbian. Linuxes use it somewhat at system level. Browsers use SQLite for storage via HTML 5, earlier via Google Gears.

With 2010 we've started to employ identica (then connected to Twitter and Facebook) as an channel for our live changelog at the {power}user level. Here's the dump for the past ~30 days (oh I should have used an XSLT).

I have self-backed policy of not mentioning competition if not really necessary, let it be G or M. So as a minimal effort I just quote these carefully selected bits (bias included!) instead of commenting the recent story:

Today we enjoy 11th anniversary of disclosure of Microsoft's best business and development practices:

Recently a number of nice coincidences happened: I received my second-hand Intuos3 A5 tablet just day before the new shiny Qt 4.6 has landed with QTouchEvent (among many other features).

Many small fixes are a building block of the Kexi porting effort - the goal is joining the KOffice 2.2. Many of the fixes and refactoring is related to forms. Much more left and we're scheduling works on crazy features even up to Kexi 2.6 already.

Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing Adam:

As Maemo Summit 2009 starts in a few hours. While I am not there, for me one of the most interesting parts is the Handheld Glom: Easy database applications presentation. Glom is a desktop database developed by GNOME friends using gtkmm (C++). Originally bound directly to PostgreSQL, recently (early 2009) has gained SQLite file database support (default engine in Kexi since 2004).

Shocked by the title? So I am.

Would you like to see Qt supported on this platform? Just two days ago the answer was like "But it's close to impossible".
Now with NDK 1.6 the "little robot" OS opens more to C/C++ native code. I am eager to read some analysis on the topic.