Subject: The Holloween Document (fwd)

From: [email-masked] (Ariel Faigon)
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 21:06:01 -0800 (PST)

[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

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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