Date: Tue, 03 Nov 1998 10:52:12 -0800 From: Matt Welsh <mdw@cs.berkeley.edu> To: cs@millennium.berkeley.edu, extreme-linux@acl.lanl.gov, beowulf@cesdis1.gsfc.nasa.gov Subject: Microsoft Open Source document Message-ID: <199811031852.KAA25675@bhikku.CS.Berkeley.EDU>
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Microsoft has confirmed that the following document, leaked to Eric Raymond, is authentic. It's a study of "Open Source" systems, and Linux in particular, with respect to Microsoft's marketing strategy. It appears as though the document was meant to be read by Bill Gates. http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/halloween.html There are some very interesting quotes here (reproduced below), whereby Microsoft intends to "deny OSS projects entry into the market". I boycott Microsoft in all of my research and personal computer use activities. It is clearly dangerous to be working with a corporation which intends to close out industry-standard and OSS systems with its own technology. I also feel that as Computer Scientists we have a duty to support viable alternatives to Microsoft systems -- regardless of how good or bad Microsoft systems might be. If Computer Scientists and other educated individuals don't stand up to the Microsoft monopoly, who will? As such I simply refuse to use Microsoft systems for anything -- from developing research code to writing talks. In the coming weeks I'll be making my "Boycott Microsoft" site online with a set of reccommendations for those who want to do the same. If you're interested in contributing to this effort please let me know! Matt Welsh, mdw@cs.berkeley.edu UC Berkeley Computer Science Division -- Quotes from the Microsoft OSS 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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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