We should now turn this label around and club them bloody with it.
It all seems to be coming together quite nicely. By the time the smoke clears, Microsoft will need to not only re-brand their product names, but as well the 'Microsoft' brand altogether. The squeeze is on.
Here's an email from earlier this evening: Eric Raymond to Linus Torvalds (found public), regarding the 'Halloween' document.
JCJ
----
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 17:52:39 -0500
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
Cc: bod@li.org
Subject: Re: Leaked Microsoft white paper on Linux and Open Source
Organization: Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs
X-Eric-Conspiracy: There is no conspiracy
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>:
> Oh, and she tells me that MSFT has acknowledged the story. In case you
> didn't have that already..
Yes, my contact at the Wall Street Jurnal told me that Microsoft has admitted
the VinodV memo is genuine. This fact will become public knowledge no
later than tomorrow night.
Now let me put my Minister of Propaganda hat on again...
With this memo, Microsoft has very kindly handed us a
sinister-sounding label, "de-commoditizing services and protocols",
for what is indeed one of their more long-term-dangerous forms of
behavior.
We should now turn this label around and club them bloody with it.
That is, I think we need to start making it a continuing theme in our public
statements that:
1. Buyers like being in a commodity market. Sellers dislike it.
2. Commodity services and protocols are good for customers; they're
less expensive, they promote competition, they generate good choices.
3. "De-commoditizing" protocols means reducing choice, raising prices,
and suppressing competition.
4. Therefore, for Microsoft to win, *the customer must lose*.
5. Open source pushes -- indeed *relies upon* -- commodity services
and protocols.
(This is copied to bod@li.org in order to spread this meme.)
--
<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism
is its adherents.
-- George Orwell |
