When Linux Spooked Microsoft: Remembering 1998's Leaked 'Halloween Documents' (catb.org) 59
It happened a quarter of a century ago. The New York Times wrote that "An internal memorandum reflecting the views of some of Microsoft's top executives and software development managers reveals deep concern about the threat of free software and proposes a number of strategies for competing against free programs that have recently been gaining in popularity."
The memo warns that the quality of free software can meet or exceed that of commercial programs and describes it as a potentially serious threat to Microsoft. The document was sent anonymously last week to Eric Raymond, a key figure in a loosely knit group of software developers who collaboratively create and distribute free programs ranging from operating systems to Web browsers. Microsoft executives acknowledged that the document was authentic...
In addition to acknowledging that free programs can compete with commercial software in terms of quality, the memorandum calls the free software movement a "long-term credible" threat and warns that employing a traditional Microsoft marketing strategy known as "FUD," an acronym for "fear, uncertainty and doubt," will not succeed against the developers of free software. The memorandum also voices concern that Linux is rapidly becoming the dominant version of Unix for computers powered by Intel microprocessors.
The competitive issues, the note warns, go beyond the fact that the software is free. It is also part of the open-source software, or O.S.S., movement, which encourages widespread, rapid development efforts by making the source code — that is, the original lines of code written by programmers — readily available to anyone. This enables programmers the world over to continually write or suggest improvements or to warn of bugs that need to be fixed. The memorandum notes that open software presents a threat because of its ability to mobilize thousands of programmers. "The ability of the O.S.S. process to collect and harness the collective I.Q. of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing," the memo states. "More importantly, O.S.S. evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale."
Back in 1998, Slashdot's CmdrTaco covered the whole brouhaha — including this CNN article: A second internal Microsoft memo on the threat Linux poses to Windows NT calls the operating system "a best-of-breed Unix" and wonders aloud if the open-source operating system's momentum could be slowed in the courts.
As with the first "Halloween Document," the memo — written by product manager Vinod Valloppillil and another Microsoft employee, Josh Cohen — was obtained by Linux developer Eric Raymond and posted on the Internet. In it, Cohen and Valloppillil, who also authored the first "Halloween Document," appear to suggest that Microsoft could slow the open-source development of Linux with legal battles. "The effect of patents and copyright in combating Linux remains to be investigated," the duo wrote.
Microsoft's slogain in 1998 was "Where do you want to go today?" So Eric Raymond published the documents on his web site under the headline "Where will Microsoft try to drag you today? Do you really want to go there?"
25 years later, and it's all still up there and preserved for posterity on Raymond's web page — a collection of leaked Microsoft documents and related materials known collectively as "the Halloween documents." And Raymond made a point of thanking the writers of the documents, "for authoring such remarkable and effective testimonials to the excellence of Linux and open-source software in general."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mtaht for remembering the documents' 25th anniversary...
In addition to acknowledging that free programs can compete with commercial software in terms of quality, the memorandum calls the free software movement a "long-term credible" threat and warns that employing a traditional Microsoft marketing strategy known as "FUD," an acronym for "fear, uncertainty and doubt," will not succeed against the developers of free software. The memorandum also voices concern that Linux is rapidly becoming the dominant version of Unix for computers powered by Intel microprocessors.
The competitive issues, the note warns, go beyond the fact that the software is free. It is also part of the open-source software, or O.S.S., movement, which encourages widespread, rapid development efforts by making the source code — that is, the original lines of code written by programmers — readily available to anyone. This enables programmers the world over to continually write or suggest improvements or to warn of bugs that need to be fixed. The memorandum notes that open software presents a threat because of its ability to mobilize thousands of programmers. "The ability of the O.S.S. process to collect and harness the collective I.Q. of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing," the memo states. "More importantly, O.S.S. evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale."
Back in 1998, Slashdot's CmdrTaco covered the whole brouhaha — including this CNN article: A second internal Microsoft memo on the threat Linux poses to Windows NT calls the operating system "a best-of-breed Unix" and wonders aloud if the open-source operating system's momentum could be slowed in the courts.
As with the first "Halloween Document," the memo — written by product manager Vinod Valloppillil and another Microsoft employee, Josh Cohen — was obtained by Linux developer Eric Raymond and posted on the Internet. In it, Cohen and Valloppillil, who also authored the first "Halloween Document," appear to suggest that Microsoft could slow the open-source development of Linux with legal battles. "The effect of patents and copyright in combating Linux remains to be investigated," the duo wrote.
Microsoft's slogain in 1998 was "Where do you want to go today?" So Eric Raymond published the documents on his web site under the headline "Where will Microsoft try to drag you today? Do you really want to go there?"
25 years later, and it's all still up there and preserved for posterity on Raymond's web page — a collection of leaked Microsoft documents and related materials known collectively as "the Halloween documents." And Raymond made a point of thanking the writers of the documents, "for authoring such remarkable and effective testimonials to the excellence of Linux and open-source software in general."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mtaht for remembering the documents' 25th anniversary...
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Do you know who else agreed with Kyle Rittenhouse?
His jury.
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Re:ESR (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because something might be legal (self-defense in the moment) doesn't mean the decisions leading up to it (going out of your way to put yourself in that situation) weren't mind-numbingly stupid. It's not for nothing that many States -- including highly conservative ones -- prohibit firearms at demonstrations. You're bringing a deadly weapon into a situation where emotions and tempers are already running high. It is mind-numbingly stupid. Two humans are dead because of the decisions Kyle made. He may not be legally culpable. Morally? Absolutely.
American gun culture jumped the shark. I had a concealed carry license before they were fashionable. We were taught to avoid situations where it might be necessary to employ deadly force. We were taught that it had to be an absolute last resort. We were taught to turn the other cheek even when confronted with a situation where we were in the absolute right if turning the other cheek meant not having to shoot someone.
Now these idiots fetishize guns to the point of including them on Xmas Cards, and run towards problems. *facepalm*
What that little turd did should not be glorified. Best case, he's a normal human being who is now scarred for life. You ever talk to a non-sociopath who has had to take a human life? It wrecks you. Worst case, he's actually a sociopath. I tend to lean towards "worst case" given his publicity seeking actions subsequent to his acquittal.
Re:ESR (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who are morally culpable for the deaths that night are .. the two dead people. One of them was aggressively trying to start fights with other armed people, and he chased Rittenhouse down while Rittenhouse was trying to flee. The other assaulted Rittenhouse in an unprovoked attack using a deadly weapon. (The third guy Rittenhouse shot pointed an illegally possessed pistol at Rittenhouse just before he got shot. Rittenhouse isn't morally culpable for that shooting either.)
The common moral of their stories: FAFO.
Re: ESR (Score:2)
Should have shown that famous left wing tolerance and not hassled and threatened Kyle!
Re: ESR (Score:4, Informative)
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Wow that was grim reading... (I only read ~~20 comments or so). ESR was *very* sure of his position... I wonder if he still feels like that now. :(
Why wouldn't he? The situation was what it was. Out of control thugs, terrorizing the area. With government just winking at the situation.
If you don't want vigilantes, then ... don't do that.
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Why wouldn't he? The situation was what it was. Out of control thugs, terrorizing the area. With government just winking at the situation.
And yet, if I had gone to Washington, D.C. on January 6th and started shooting the terrorists attacking the capitol police and trying to subvert the elction process, I would have been labeled a criminal.
As someone who had firsthand knowledge of such situations wrote, Rittenhouse was either a terrorist or an insurgent [twitter.com]. He had no authority to be there and was not sanction
Re:ESR (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet, if I had gone to Washington, D.C. on January 6th and started shooting the terrorists attacking the capitol police and trying to subvert the elction process, I would have been labeled a criminal.
Seeing how you and the police (at protesters) would have been the only ones doing any shooting ... yeah, maybe?
Re:ESR (Score:4, Informative)
That supposed combat veteran didn't know either English or law. Hopefully he learned since then, but you did not. Besides, that rando's application of his own (wrong) definition ignored that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. Contemplate what it says about you that you cited somebody so wrong and then tried to hide behind "take it up with [the] author" that you endorsed and also attempting your stupid "cannot use those terms to apply to anyone, anywhere else in the world" false equivalence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] is a good starting point for not using a wrong definition of terrorism.
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Clearly the situation is more nuanced; it almost always is. The "vigilantes" might've been "protesters". But to be fair, likely there was a mix of people... but for that reason, just blank labelling everyone as a Communist is... kind of dumb really! And I'd hope ESR's red-mist has faded and perhaps the passing of time might allow him to see a bit more objectively?
But the thing
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I remember still when we were the revolutionaries (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember picketing frys and handing out CDs of Linux, and protesting to stop paying the Microsoft Tax!
I remember being afraid for my job if I contributed to FOSS under my own name.
I remember the real-world evidence that had accumulated that Linux + Samba was massively better than NT + SMB - I had had a site that crashed 3 times a week with NT, and replaced it with Linux.
I remember the ease of remote support for that, leveraging ssh rather than a gui.
I remember how we as a community pulled together to tackle many of the real problems we had had then (like multi-processor support) support that Microsoft had identified for us.
In looking over that old Microsoft strategy today - I do see many bothersome things - like "decommoditizing protocols" - that still infect the industry. It would be good for more here to re-read the first and second Halloween documents and reflect on the good and the bad!
One thing entirely missed by all in 1998 is the rise of the web (and phone!) replacing applications that ran locally, with things like drag and drop. Sometimes I point to the GPLv2 as being a proximate cause of the rise of the cloud as that kept the custom code out of the customer hands.
Thx for reposting this.Very few modern Linux folk seem to remember the context of the original war. What will the next 25 years look like?
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"Thx for reposting this.Very few modern Linux folk seem to remember the context of the original war. What will the next 25 years look like?"
Who cares?
It's over. Everything is going to be an appliance. In the future you code or you go home. But with AI- that's over soon too.
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In other words we won the battle but lost the war. It's amazing how mainstream Linux is now but it's also disheartening how greedy companies have been able to effectively use free software in exploitative ways that aren't all that different from the old proprietary days.
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Rather predictable, actually. Information may want to be free, but assets want to be owned. And eventually, they are.
Re:I remember still when we were the revolutionari (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing entirely missed by all in 1998 is the rise of the web (and phone!) replacing applications that ran locally, with things like drag and drop.
There are a lot of interesting things to be learned by examining what has happened in the last 25 years.
With respect to Linux, for example, it's clear that Microsoft was both right and wrong to be worried about the danger of FLOSS to their business. Windows is still the dominant PC OS, for example, and no one talks about the "Year of Linux on the desktop", except as a joke. It's clear that Linux is not going to displace Windows on the desktop (though it did on my desktop in ~2000, and I'll never go back). But Linux has made some inroads on the desktop, in the form of ChromeOS, and has become the core of the world's most popular consumer operating system, Android, as well as utterly owning the server market -- where, thanks to the web, nearly all of the world's biggest and most important applications live.
So Linux has both been defeated by Windows and has utterly destroyed it, in different segments. But some of Linux' big wins (on cheap laptops and on mobile) required big compromises in the FLOSS philosophy, with significant restrictions in user choice, and arguably on servers as well, where the systems are still very FLOSS-ish, but only for the people who build and manage them, the services offered don't allow end users to modify them. The ideals survive on Linux desktops and servers primarily because those systems are primarily used by geeks, with the interest and ability to tinker. It's clear that the broader consumer market is just confused by the form of freedom in the Free Software ethos, to the extent that they don't even want free-as-in-beer (which, of course, they do understand) if it doesn't have significant guardrails installed.
Sometimes I point to the GPLv2 as being a proximate cause of the rise of the cloud as that kept the custom code out of the customer hands
Maybe, but I don't think so. Centralized computing has been a consistent theme since the dawn of computing. It was originally out of necessity, but it also offers a lot of value, primarily because it simplifies so much. GPLv2 may have given some nudges, but I think if GPLv3 had been dominant from the beginning we'd still have seen the emergence of the cloud. Perhaps it would be architected a little differently, to wall off the FLOSS bits, and perhaps it would have used a little less FLOSS, but it's too fundamentally useful not to have happened.
Re:I remember still when we were the revolutionari (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux will take over the desktop as the desktop goes away.
More and more software is being delivered through a browser as a service, including Microsoft's bread and butter, Office.
You can run Office 365 web apps just as well on a Chromebook without any Windows at all on it as you can on a Windows PC.
At work we use Windows 11 and real IP Phones with handsets (and headsets) and we mostly still have real office installed on our PCs, but they are working on moving to using the web versions of everything and having nothing installed, and they issued us cell phones and the plan is to ditch the traditional IP phones for everything but the call center. Part of the idea is to make us more mobile so that we can be more flexible in the case of another disaster; quake, fire, flood, tsunami, any combination thereof. But the other part is that if we have a problem with our PC it's largely irrelevant, they just issue us another one and we log into it and everything is there. And you can have a chromebook in an AD domain.
From Microsoft's standpoint it might actually be a win. Having to maintain windows costs money, having to develop it does too, why bother doing either thing? If you can sell licenses to your crappy SaaS and thereby make sure that you're getting paid, what's the advantage to selling Windows licenses and then having to go on to support Windows, which is a clusterfuck? It makes a lot more sense to focus on the application licensing. People already want to run creative applications on either Mac (individuals and small businesses) or Linux (if they expect to have a lot of seats and don't want to have to pay for them) and never have really wanted to run them on Windows.
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Linux will take over the desktop as the desktop goes away.
This was certainly Google's pitch a decade ago, and why they invested so much in making Javascript faster, and in WebASM (with Mozilla) and ChromeOS. It's possible that you're right, but I think that trend is actually losing steam and that we'll see the pendulum swinging back, probably driven mostly by privacy and data ownership concerns.
To the degree that it does happen, though, I think the "Linux" that moves onto the desktop will look a lot more like ChromeOS than <insert your favorite distro here
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I remember being afraid for my job if I contributed to FOSS under my own name.
Where the fuck did you work?
I've never worked anywhere that gave a shit about employee extracurricular activities unless they involve felonies. If you Google my last name you'll find FOSS contributions spanning >20 years. I have never had it mentioned in a job interview, which bums me out a bit, I assume if it were mentioned it would be in a positive light. The one place that I believe Googled me chose to mention my divorce instead of my FOSS stuff. I opted out of working for those creepy fucks, lol
Re: I remember still when we were the revolutionar (Score:3)
Apple effectively prevents employees from contributing to open source outside of work in many cases. MAME developers who go to work for Apple have to drop MAME.
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I can see validity in that, given there is zero chance you're not cross-pollinating IP. I don't mean copy and pasted source code, I mean ideas and solutions, and you wouldn't be clean-room re-implementing them.
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Now MS provide Linux install guides! (Score:2)
Re:Now MS provide Linux install guides! (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to admit, as an old coder, even though Microsoft's been supporting WSL for some time, to this day I still find it a bit delightfully surprising when I discover a page called 'How To Install Linux' on a Microsoft web site.
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I remember these days.... (Score:1)
....it was goona be the year of the linux desktop
remember SteveJobs used OSS (Score:5, Informative)
NeXT Computer Inc., used BSD and OSS to build its NeXTOS. Apple would later welcome SteveJobs and his 10yr venture building next generation operating system with unix and FOSS. AAPL renamed NeXTOS to its beloved MacOS appending the disreputable X we have all grown to recognize.
SteveJobs ever the penultimate capitalist closed-source its sole-sourced in-house API’s leaving a hybrid conglomeration of protected OSS no longer open but offered free with every computer purchased. That last part, probably saving AAPL legal problems with the FOSS community.
Re:remember SteveJobs used OSS (Score:4, Interesting)
That was how the BSD license was intended to be used though, or at least, how the various licenses were intended to be used. There was BSD, which was commercially licensed, and then there was BSD-lite, which had the commercial bits replaced with OSS so that it was redistributable. NeXTStep originally was based on BSD, then later when it became dominant due to the license, BSD-lite. And for a while it looked like BSD-lite would dominate the world of OSS Unixlikes, but then Linux came along with its superior license (contributors have outright said so) and now Apple is practically the whole BSD world — and would probably be the only BSD left if not for those people who want their ZFS to come with their OSS kernel instead of being shipped separately.
BITD there were a whole bunch of licensed BSDs. SunOS4 springs immediately to mind. You could either have AIX 3 or a BSD-4.3-derived system for the first commercial RISC systems, IBM ROMP... but by the end of anyone caring about it you could get BSD 4.4-lite.
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AIX 3 was not really 100% BSD. It also had a strong SVR4 component in it too. For example, it had the first ps command which accepted both BSD options (ps aux), and SVR4 options (ps -ef). Of course, it had a lot of proprietary stuff from Interact thrown in which the IBM team pretty much rewrote, but AIX 3.x sort of was in its own area, and not really either BSD or SVR4. If you want a BSD, Solaris 1.x. SVR4, Solaris 2.x.
These days, there are not that many flavors of UNIX. You pretty much have Linux, So
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AIX 3 was not really 100% BSD.
I mentioned it only in contrast to BSD 4.3 for ROMP which was called AOS.
If you want a BSD, Solaris 1.x. SVR4, Solaris 2.x.
Solaris 2.x (SunOS 5.x) is SVR4, although it did have an optional set of BSD commands so that you could use them to make your scripts written for SunOS4 work on SunOS5 without changes to anything but the path.
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These days, there are not that many flavors of UNIX. You pretty much have Linux, Solaris, AIX, QNX, and the 386BSD descendants (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD).
IBM sent all AIX Development to another Country. I suspect that may be the first step in selling it off. Nothing wrong with where it was sent, but I expect eventually IBM will abandon AIX probably in 5 years or so :)
Microsoft lost to Google (Score:1)
I remember when Bush Jr got elected (Score:1)
Nowadays Microsoft can buy out 70 billion dollar company that dominates an entire space of gaming and we barely even pretend it's an antitrust issue before rubber stamping it. Never mind all the
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You have an interesting [nytimes.com] definition [yahoo.com] of rubber stamping.
kind of hilarious in respect (Score:2)
Open Source was never a threat to Microsoft, because nobody but programmers just want to run some random code. People want a polished product, customer support, litigation indemnification, and an ecosystem or platform of tools designed to work together.
The Open Source world was never going to replace Microsoft's product line, enterprise features, support, etc. But they got really scared of the free part and stopped thinking.
Today businesses that revolve around Open Source still don't take business away from
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litigation indemnification
What software company, whether closed or open source, provides litigation indemnification?
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Well, Oracle of course.
They provide complete indemnification against the already remote possibility of their NOT suing you.
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>People want a polished product, customer support, litigation indemnification, and an ecosystem or platform of tools designed to work together.
Open Source can do that. It just won't let you charge for the resulting code (or at least, stop someone else from giving it away if you try that).
And it can do all that while giving your clients confidence that you're not hiding anything from them, and that if your business goes belly-up, they can get their support elsewhere.
It means that you have to work a bit h
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Windows based on Linux, what might have been (Score:2)
In 1998, Apple had recently purchased NeXT announced that Mac OS X would be built atop BSD Unix. There was talk about the potential benefits of Microsoft doing something similar with Windows, making the GUI a component on top of Linux.
I still think that would have been a good move. Microsoft would have benefited from getting a stable and proven multitasking OS (something which was only realized around the time of Windows 7, I'd say) with a broad set of drivers, and Linux would have gotten improvements it ne
MacOS based on taligent? (Score:2)
"Linux and Open Source Software" (Score:1)
...was famously abbreviated by Microsoft to "LOSS".
Microsoft nearly won this battle after 2000... (Score:2)
I remember after 2000, especially 2001 and after Enron, where Sarbanes-Oxley compliance was a huge thing, so all operating systems had to be "SOX compliance". This had companies toss entire Linux installs for Windows just because there were FIPS and Common Criteria certs with commercial products, while Linux didn't have them, and didn't really need them for this.
Red Hat achieved a great market by getting FIPS and Common Criteria certified, getting Linux back into the server rooms, but there was a time wher
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EEE (Score:2)
Now 25 years later we are in the middle of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, the other Microsoft strategy, and so many people, including some posting here won't acknowledge EEE is a thing.
Microsoft Linux - the premier Linux (Score:2)
http://www.mslinux.org/ [mslinux.org]
I was one of the people who leaked it (Score:1)
I saw it at work. I thought, "This is so unreasonable, people need to see this." I printed it, put it in an envelope with no return address, and dropped it in the mail to Commander Taco. I don't think Slashdot leaked it to Eric, I think other people also realised that was a document that needed sunlight on it.