Date: Sun, 01 Nov 1998 22:54:07 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Microsoft "Halloween document:" Authentic? Message-ID: <4.1.19981101223919.0462acd0@127.0.0.1>
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Eric Raymond has published a document which he claims is an internal white paper from Microsoft on the subject of open source software. The document is "conveniently" slanted toward the Linux camp in that it identifies Linux as being of major interest (and a major threat to Microsoft) and dismisses FreeBSD (and the other *BSDs) as too little of a threat to be worth investigating. (The list of open source software projects of interest, at the end of the document, doesn't include a link to any *BSD Web sites.) It also describes the presence of a core team, and coordination and vetting of contributions to the code base, as weaknesses rather than strengths. It's not clear whether the document is authentic, a "head fake" (intentional leak), or a complete fraud. However, the slant toward Linux, and the absence of more than a passing mention of the *BSDs, strikes me as suspicious -- as if a Linux partisan wrote it. What do you think? Raymond has posted the document at http://www.tuxedo.org/%7Eesr/halloween.html --Brett Glass To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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