New Halloween Memo leaked from Microsoft

[llbbl]

Eric Raymond (ESR) has published another leaked Microsoft memo, dubbed
Halloween VII [http://opensource.org/halloween/halloween7.php]. It
summarises the results from some market research into how Open Source
Software (OSS) is perceived by people in the IT industry. For those
who don't know, the first two Halloween documents were internal memos
leaked from within Microsoft. In them Microsoft talked candidly about
"decommoditizing" standard protocols as a method for locking competition
out of the market. ESR has posted these memos with interlined
comments and his conclusions and recommendations. In addition to
pointing readers at these I'd like to add a few of my own.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/7/55538/0038

By Paul Johnson, 2002-11-07 23:15:53
Section: Op-Ed, Topic: News

[ruri]

I'd love to see how MS plans to fight the open-source community seeing how their strategy for past wars don't work so well against open-source.

To wit, open source:


Isn't own by a single company
Cannot be bought out
Is usually free and cannot be undercut
Doesn't depend of MS generosity
Doesn't demand strict EULAs
Don't have shareholders to worry about


Of course, one should never underestimate MS, but it doesn't appear any of their strategy which they have used so succesfully against former titans like Lotus, Corel, Borland, WordPerfect and Ashton-Tate are having any significant effect on the open-source community.

If anything, stunts like this will only galvanize the OS community.

[llbbl]

Free Music and Free Software is worth fighting for !