IP: : the Halloween Document

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Mon, 02 Nov 1998 18:35:00 -0500
From: James Love <love () cptech org>

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Info-Policy-Notes | News from Consumer Project on Technology 
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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 () 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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_____________________________________________________________________
David Farber         
The Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems
University of Pennsylvania 
Home Page: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber