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SubjectHalloween Memo (was ... Microsoft Open Source document)

Is this the document? If so, if this has been well discussed, I'm
sorry to bother you... I came in at the discussion on receiving
non-standard e-mail.

I received the following information in journalist Gareth Powell's
e-mail newsletter. If you occasionally buy a selection real, paper
"Internet" magazines you will have discovered the means of
subscribing to Powell's letter.

Gareth Powell newses about the "Halloween Memo ... a 35 page
confidential study" by a Microsoft program manager, Vinod
Valloppillil, concerning Linux.

He says that Microsoft has replied officially to the leak via Ed
Muth, enterprise marketing group manager at Microsoft, who admits
the document was circulated at Microsoft in August but denies that
it states an official Microsoft position.

To quote Powell, "The memo is talking of Linux as an open operating
system -- OSS -- in that there is no charge and anyone can play. It
shows that Microsoft is, at the very least, worried."
The memo talks of the kinds of threats Linux poses to Microsoft.
There are proximate threats, particularly the "platform threat ...
in server space", and the strategic threat that arises because "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 mind-share threat..."
The memo continues, says Powell, "Recent case studies provide very
dramatic evidence... that commercial quality can be achieved /
exceeded by OSS projects... Linux is on track to eventually own the
x86 Unix market..."

And, "The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the
collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is
simply amazing. More important, OSS evangelization scales with the
size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts
appear to scale."

Now for the remedy proposed in the memo. Earlier in this (?) thread
someone said that Microsoft would never try polluting Internet
networking protocols because it was hard enough to get even simple
ones to work. Well, this is only one recommendation circulating at
Microsoft, but here it is, quoting Powell quoting the memo:

"[Open source software] 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."

I can't resist quoting Gareth Powell's own words in conclusion: "The
people at Microsoft may be mainly bright -- although I was ever
willing to listen to an argument against the proposition. But this
memo shows that they are not nice people."

--Mike



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