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The Halloween Documents By Eric Steven Raymond. First question: what Halloween Documents are? From Wikipedia, we may read: "The Halloween documents comprise a series of confidential Microsoft memoranda on potential strategies relating to free software, open-source software, and to Linux in particular, and a series of responses to these memoranda. The documents are associated with Halloween because many of them were originally leaked close to 31 October in different years. Both the leaked documents and the responses were published by Eric Raymond ( the maintainer of the so-called Jargon File )". This is the story. And this is the Eric Raymond website, where we may find the original documents and the Eric Raymond comments. In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and Open Source software was leaked to me by a source who shall remain nameless. I annotated this memorandum with explanation and commentary over Halloween Weekend and released it to the national press. Microsoft was forced to acknowledge its authenticity ( the press rightly treated it as a major story and covered it, with varying degrees of cluefulness ), but dismissed it as a mere engineering study that does not define Microsoft policy. Here are some notable quotes from the document. It's helpful to know that "OSS" is the author's abbreviation for "Open Source Software". FUD ( Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt ), a characteristic Microsoft tactic, is a strategic attempt to influence public perception by disseminating negative and dubious/false information. "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 ... OSS is long-term credible ... FUD tactics can not be used to combat it ... to understand how to compete against OSS, we must target a process rather than a company ... 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". The now-infamous "Halloween Document" contained references to a second memorandum specifically on Linux. Within days, copies of the second memo had been forwarded to me from two separate sources. I renamed the first annotated version "Halloween I" and set about annotating the second. Over time, these memoranda have grown into quite a series. The Halloween Documents I, II, III, VII, VIII and X are leaked Microsoft documents with annotations. The common theme is that the Halloween Documents reveal, from Microsoft's own words, the things Microsoft doesn't want you to know.
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