Microsoft Corp group product manager Edmund Muth has responded to the controversy over the leaked internal memo painting open source software – and particularly Linux – as a direct threat to the company’s future revenues. The memo, leaked to open source advocate Eric Raymond and dubbed The Halloween Document has alarmed the open source community with an implied threat to the platform-independent protocols on which the internet depends. Muth says that if Microsoft does produce proprietary versions of these internet standards and services, they will benefit consumers by providing better integration within products like Windows NT, for example. He dismisses cross-platform interoperability as less important customer concern. What writer Vinod Valloppillil recommended is that Microsoft: Fold extended functionality into commodity protocols/services and create new protocols. Open source advocate Eric Raymond called this nothing less than trying to subvert the entire ‘commodity network and server’ infrastructure (featuring TCP/IP, SMPT, HTTP, POP3, IMAP, NFS and other open standards) into… customer- and market-control devices for Microsoft. By contrast, Muth calls this process innovation. Take TCP, something everybody uses, he said, TCP/IP doesn’t actually do anything for you. Higher-level services which let you send encrypted email, for example, do. It’s the difference between being able to make a phone connection to France and being able to speak French. That adds value to your customers. Muth says Microsoft doesn’t want to break TCP/IP by adding these extra services on top. Unless they break the platform-independent protocols, though, how will those new protocols help Windows NT, in the words of the Halloween document, beat Linux? Muth contends that Windows NT will prevail because its services are more integrated. By contrast, he says, Linux’s use of commodity protocols means users need separate tools for connectivity and encrypted mail. Sure, you can go out and buy those and add them in, but now you have to worry about how they will work in your less integrated OS model. Now the customer is in the systems integration business. With source available, though, the customer can fix any bugs that arise on their own and without having to wait for vendor patches. Isn’t that the whole advantage of open source? No, says Muth, it’s the whole bug of open software. It offloads a great deal of technical complexity on the end user. They would prefer computers to be more like refrigerators. They would like the appliance to simply function. In the end I think you have to look at what customers are buying as the ultimate report card, Muth says. Of course, Microsoft has worked very hard to achieve the sort of user lock-in which keeps customers buying. Indeed, it has been rumored that Microsoft knew of and approved the leak of the Halloween document as a tactical device in its battle with the Department of Justice. The reasoning is that if Microsoft itself considers Linux a serious competitor, it can’t be said to have a monopoly on the operating systems market. Muth unconsciously echoes these rumors in his closing remarks: I think this white paper and the general hype in the industry around Linux demonstrates that the operating system marketplace is a very competitive marketplace in terms of technologies and of business models. As long as protocols remain open, it will remain so.
