The Halloween Documents

Introduction

Where will Microsoft try to drag you today?

Do you really want to go there?

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).

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. While not as dramatic or sinister in its implications as its predecessor, Halloween II includes a lot of material at variance with Microsoft's public party line on Linux.

This page originally continued with an anti-Microsoft jeremiad. On reflection, however, I think I'd prefer to finish by thanking the principal authors, Vinod Valloppillil and Josh Cohen, for authoring such remarkable and effective testimonials to the excellence of Linux and open-source software in general. I suspect that historians may someday regard the Halloween memoranda as your finest hour, and the Internet community certainly owes you a vote of thanks.

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. IV is a satire based on an idiotic lead-with-the-chin remark by the person who was at the time Microsoft's anti-Linux point person; V is serious comment on a statement by the same fool. VI is a takedown of one of the bought-and-paid-for "independent studies" Microsoft marketing leans on so heavily, IX refutes the Amended Complaint by Microsoft's sock puppets at SCO, and XI is a field report from one of Microsoft's marketing road shows. The common theme is that the Halloween Documents reveal, from Microsoft's own words, the things Microsoft doesn't want you to know.