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Microsoft earlier this week said it plans to separate its popular Windows SharePoint Services offering from future releases of Windows Server 2008.

Starting with release candidate 1 of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft will offer Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 only as a separate download, and not as part of the software package.
Windows SharePoint Services, a free subset of Office SharePoint Server that includes limited collaboration, social computing and document management functionality.
Not sure why Microsoft is doing this.