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Microsoft's Reaction to OSS Adoption
inode_buddha writes "Eric S. Raymond has the eighth "Halloween" memo available here. It looks like Microsoft is really beginning to notice the national and corporate movement towards FS/OSS, and is reacting accordingly."
Questions about annotation and authenticity are covered in the faq here.
Don't know how valid the answers are, but there's something to look at...
From: Orlando Ayala
Sent: Monday, November 25, 2002 5:22 AM
To: GMs of Subsidiaries
Cc: Mich Mathews; Mike Nash; Craig Mundie; Brad Smith (LCA); Pamela Passman (LCA); Vivek
Varma; Orlando Ayala's Direct Reports
Subject: OSS and Goverment
We need to more effectively respond to press reports regarding Governments and other major
institutions considering OSS alternatives to our products. We must be prepared to respond to
announcements, such as this one by the Japan Government (or prior announcements in Peru,
Germany etc) quickly and with facts to counter the perception that large institutions are
deploying OSS or Linux, when they are only considering or just piloting the technology.
Announcements by governments are reported quickly around the world and require more
coordination. In several instances, our ability to communicate effectively has been hindered
by a lack of integration across groups in Redmond and the subsidiaries.
What to Escalate: Any instance of government organizations and significant corporate
customers who are planning to study, support or deploy OSS including Linux and Star Office
that is likely to generate media attention (as differentiated from the COMPHOT alias). Any
media coverage detailing the real or expected announcement of a government organization of
corporate customer to study, support or deploy OSS.
How to Escalate: Send an email immediately (same day) to the OSSI alias. This group includes
members from the Security Business Unit, Server Marketing, LCA and Corporate PR who can
quickly pull in additional stakeholders, influence business decisions, create and
communicate PR guidance. Your mail should include the following information:
# Designate the subsidiary owner (s) and their 24 hour contact information
# Explain the overall validity of claim, what is being reported, what is true/false
# Explain how and where the organization fits within govt structure (is it a
small/medium/large department, how much influence does it have on other IT decisions, are
their political influences at play, is there a commitment to deploy, what are the specific
details of the announcement, what are the next steps)
# Explain likely influences, bottom line reasoning on why this is happening (i.e. security,
cost, politics)
# Explain Microsoft's presence in the account
# Name the key contacts within the gov't
# Name available third parties/potential defenders
# Provide detail on the writer and their media who are writing the story, i.e. are they
technical, political, sensational
The Commitment From Corporate:
# Deliver, at minimum, guidance and messaging regarding any new instance within the same
business day of your mail being received, including WW communication to prepare all subs
# Follow up with additional guidance, messaging and content within a second business day,
including customer and government communication tools
# ecome much better in giving messaging and content proactively on OSS and Linux related
issues.
# Todd and MarkM to coordinate with SueB on Mike Nash participation in Linux business press
tour
Orlando
ESR marked all his comments with div.c1.comment. If you don't want to see them, just change the color to transparent. Get a clue.
"RMS makes a good point with the quote from Ghandi"
It should be noted that ESR, not RMS annotated this particular document.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
Be sure to read your EULAs real close before you do this. Microsoft has worded their EULAs so that you still have to license a copy of the app for every machine you have that connects to citrix. You also have to have a Microsoft Terminal Services CAL for every machine that connects to the Citrix server, because the citrix server is running on top of Microsoft Terminal Services. The cost for a TS CAL is about 1/4 of an XP license...
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
And until I can pay my bills over the Internet, it wouldn't be a substitute for me either.
I have an account with Bank of America (yeah, I agree the suck for the most part, but convience of ATM and good online bill pay is worth it), and with direct deposit I get free online bill pay. I pay all my bills via the Internet, the service works find with Mozilla.
His main claim to popularity comes from writing "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". The problem is that the seminal understandings that sprang from that lightweight volume are now considered common knowledge. ESR was the first to codify into easily-understood form the innate truths about free software development that people had long since suspected.
He's come out with some more good ones (in particular, I like "Homesteading the Noosphere), but he hasn't written any work with more impact than than "Cathedral". He was also the first to publish the original "Halloween Document", which showed that Microsoft was, at last, taking the GNU/Linux threat seriously.
These days, almost everybody in the free-software/OSS development world understands the difference between the Bazaar and Cathedral development methods. They often consciously choose one or the other, or to develop according to Cathedral methodology, and transition to Bazaar after initial successful release. People understand the success of the development of GNU/Linux now, and despite what some will try to say, most really didn't until 1996 and the CaTB publication.
Lately, he's mostly a critic. Fetchmail is very slow on the development side these days, and his efforts to create a new build system for the Linux kernel were not accepted (killer effort, though, and well thought out, just too politically charged and too sweeping of a change for most people's tastes). However, he's still an exceptionally influential self-appointed Linux advocate. His opinions are read by millions of readers in and out of the free software community.
For the bio on the stuff he's done that has had a massive impact on the free/oss software scene, check out his bio: http://tuxedo.org/~esr/resume.html
Regardless, he has many publications in print and does a lot of speaking conventions. Like Bruce Perens, who is also influential in the community, he chose the role of public advocate for GNU/Linux for himself, and has been very successful in that role.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
Here in Brazil, near 95% of personal computers are sold by the called "integrators", they assemble the parts.
So the Windows licence is a sort of an "optional" part. I worked in some of then and I see that is very, very optional, like an joystick, just a little fracion opt for it "legalized", the other 90% have just it "installed" and with Microsoft Office.
If they are licensed, Win & Office, they will cost near the same as the whole computer.
I Don't know exactlly how is in others countries, but i think in USA near 100% of computers are from big companies like Dell and HP where Windows is not an "optional", so, the expansion of Linux will be very slowly there.
thus cutting their workstation licensing and support costs dramatically?
A company I was once with looked at Microsoft's Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition with a similar idea. Among other things, they could standardize on some NT4-specific apps without having to roll out NT4 to the whole organization. But they soon found out that the fine print of the licensing agreement said that since apps running in the terminal server were on NT4, then the user was using NT4, and if the client machine was not running NT4, you get to pay for an NT4 license. The company wound up saying "if we're gonna pay for NT4 on all our desktops, then we're gonna by God run NT4 on all our desktops". An additional downside was that whenever they want to upgrade from NT4 to NT5 (2000), they got to pay for upgrades across the board again. There were some other benfits, like WAN access and centralized administration, but licensing was definately not one of them.
Now Citrix is the company that came up with the idea of making Windows NT "multi-user" over the network. They licensed the NT3.51 source from Microsoft and fixed a lot of the "single-user-isms" and made a product out of it. Then, with NT4, Microsoft said "we won't let you make money from our OS anymore, but we will license the fixes from you so we can make money from it" and Terminal Server was born. Citrix was still making client apps for additional platforms like *NIX and handhelds and such for a while, but I'm not sure what they're up to these days.
Of course, everyone here knows that the MIT X Consortium was running graphical apps on multiuser machines over the network back in the late 1980's.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Yeah,
You need 50 Excel Licenses, but only 20 Terminal Server/Citrix Licenses (Which cost more).
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
Looked at SamsungContact ?. It's HP's OpenMail, further developed.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin