By Rachel Chalmers
Microsoft Corp engineers have admitted that open source software presents the company with a direct, short-term revenue threat, in a leaked internal memo which a Microsoft spokesperson admitted appears to be genuine. Open source evangelist Eric S Raymond has published the paper on the web at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/halloween.html. Raymond, whose paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar influenced Netscape to release the source code to its Navigator web browser, says he was unable to confirm the provenance of the memo. Microsoft’s PR company Waggener Edstrom has confirmed that it was in fact written by Microsoft engineer Vinod Valloppillil as claimed. The document contains some startling comments, not least Valloppillil’s admissions that the open source model has inherent advantages over Microsoft’s traditional software development process. The intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS [open source software] has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a longterm developer mindshare threat, Valloppillil writes. Later he adds: 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. Valloppillil is most concerned with what he calls Linux/GNU style or copyleft software. Under this kind of software license, anyone can view, modify and even bundle for sale the source code to a system or application. However they in turn must release the source to the original software and to their derivatives. Projects like GNU Emacs, Apache and Linux have taken this model and turned it into a vast collective development effort, in which students and enthusiasts communicating through internet newsgroups and mailing lists have produced software of a quality and scale that few had imagined possible. Little wonder that open source software has now appeared on Microsoft’s radar, nor that Valloppillil identifies the open source process itself as the main threat to the company’s future revenues. He concedes that Apache could threaten IIS, believes Mozilla is unlikely to displace IE, and dismisses Linux on the desktop. As far as the server operating system market goes, however, he says: Linux can win as long as service/protocols are commodities. In other words, Linux owes its success to its ability to interoperate with standard network and server infrastructure. Valloppillil does not name names but Raymond suggests TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, POP3, IMAP, NFS and so on. Valloppillil concludes that Microsoft’s best tactic is to add proprietary extensions to these existing internet standards, thereby preventing them from interoperating with open source software. OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commodotized, simple protocols, he writes, by extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market. As publisher of the leaked document, Eric Raymond urges the open source community to take up arms over this threat to internet standards and protocols. We need to use this to beat them to a bloody pulp, he told ComputerWire. I think it’s a big flare-lit signal about things the hacker community has known all along: that Microsoft is predatory and dangerous in its business practices, and that it will stop at nothing, not even screwing up standards, before it will consider improving its own products. Raymond urges open source developers and distribution companies like Red Hat and Caldera to make commodity protocols and services an integral part of their pitch to partners and users. The availability of these protocols raises competition and lowers costs, he says, Microsoft wants exactly the opposite of these trends. Let the customers draw their own conclusions. Raymond concedes that the author of document raises valid questions about the strengths and weaknesses of the open source model. For example, he says, there is a lack of really good user interfaces. Eventually we will get around to doing those things. I’d like to see us doing them faster. Maybe now we will. He says that part of the reason he published the memo was to draw the attention of the developer community to its own vulnerabilities. More than that though, Raymond says he wanted the industry at large to understand that Microsoft itself sees open source software as technically superior in certain ways to its own. I’ve been saying for some time that Linux is going to turf NT out of the server market in 18 months, says Raymond. Now it seems even Microsoft is worried. The plot thickens. The leaked document refers to a companion document, Linux OS Competitive Analysis which has not yet been released or leaked. Raymond comments: If any pro-open source person has a copy of that, I expect it to turn up in my mailbox in 48 hours. Watch this space.
