Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 18:54:39 -0500 (EST) Reply-To: love at cptech.org Originator: info-policy-notes at essential.org Sender: info-policy-notes at essential.org Precedence: bulk From: James Love <love at cptech.org> To: Multiple recipients of list INFO-POLICY-NOTES <info-policy-notes at essential.org> Subject: the Halloween Document MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Comment: To unsubscribe from this list, send the message "unsubscribe info-policy-notes" to "listproc at essential.org". Leave the "Subject:" line blank.
------------------------------------------------------------ Info-Policy-Notes | News from Consumer Project on Technology ------------------------------------------------------------ November 2, 1998
The Halloween Document
Microsoft has confirmed that this internal document, which was leaked to Eric Raymond, is authentic. It is the Microsoft strategy to deal with Linux and other free software platforms, referred to as "Open Source Software" or OSS by the MS author. Eric Raymond has placed an annotated version of the document on the web at:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/halloween.html
The memorandum offers important insight into Microsoft's understanding of the free/open source software movement. It indicates, for example, that Microsoft needs to attack the process and the culture of the free software movement, more than any particular company. Eric Raymond sees awareness by Microsoft that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its support of open software is a threat to Microsoft's goal of dominating server markets. These are the excerpts from the document that Eric placed in his introduction.
Jamie Love <love at cptech.org> 202.387.8030
<------excerpts from the MS OSS Haloween document-------->
* OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat.
* Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very dramatic evidence .. that commercial quality can be achieved / exceeded by OSS projects.
* ...to understand how to compete against OSS, we must target a process rather than a company.
* OSS is long-term credible ... FUD tactics can not be used to combat it.
* Linux and other OSS advocates are making a progressively more credible argument that OSS software is at least as robust -- if not more -- than commercial alternatives. The Internet provides an ideal, high-visibility showcase for the OSS world.
* Linux has been deployed in mission critical, commercial environments with an excellent pool of public testimonials. ... Linux outperforms many other UNIXes ... Linux is on track to eventually own the x86 UNIX market ...
* Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities.
* OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
* The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing. More importantly, OSS evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale.
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