Date: Sun, 01 Nov 1998 23:06:57 -0700 From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Ariel Faigon: The Holloween Document (fwd) Message-ID: <199811020606.XAA00655@harmony.village.org>
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I got this on a linux list that I'm on and thought I'd forward it to this group. It seems relevant. It will likely make you mad. Warner ------- Forwarded Message From: ariel@oz.engr.sgi.com (Ariel Faigon) Subject: The Holloween Document (fwd) To: linux@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com (SGI/Linux mailing list) [This is significant. It details an internal (and confidential) Microsoft sanctioned memo on how to fight the Open Source movement and Mainly Linux. ] Read carefully and Please distribute widely. The document is long I just quote some crucial parts of it] http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/halloween.html - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here are some notable quotes from the document, ``OSS'' is the author's abbreviation for ``Open Source Software''. Vinod Valloppillil (VinodV) Aug 11, 1998 ¨C v1.00 Microsoft Confidential [only a few excerpts follow, read the link above for the full details.] * 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 [Microsoft] 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 ¨C if not more ¨C 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. - -- Peace, Ariel ------- End of Forwarded Message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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