IEEE Spectrum August 2001
Volume 38 Number 8
Why
Microsoft Smears–and Fears–Open Source
By Eric
S. Raymond, Open Source Initiative
Late in
March, Microsoft Corp. escalated its war on open-source code
by launching a propaganda campaign aimed at top executives.
Through speeches and press conferences it painted Linux and
related technologies as "un-American" and "a cancer." The language
was eerily reminiscent of U.S. General Jack D. Ripper's paranoid
monologues about the threat posed by the Soviet Union in the
1964 movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb. Microsoft's intention was to persuade software
customers not to dare use or even touch open-source code because
it might pollute their vital bodily fluids, forcing all their
business secrets and proprietary software into the public domain.
This was,
of course, a ludicrous distortion of reality. Open-source software
has been the foundation of the Internet since its beginnings.
Any organization that uses the Internet's domain name system,
Internet e-mail, or the Web relies on open-source software every
day. The GNU C compiler is ubiquitous, not just on Linux and
other open-source operating systems, but also on Sun Microsystems'
Solaris and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, as well as on the other
closed-source Unixes traditionally used at corporate data centers
everywhere. There has never been a single case in which using
these essential tools led to disclosure of a corporation's business
secrets or proprietary software.
Mightily
has the company striven to confuse the use of software with
the derivation of software, and all open-source licenses with
the one license--the GNU General Public License, or GPL--that
mandates that derivative works of GPL'ed code must themselves
be issued under GPL terms. Among other things, these terms require
that program source code be made available to anyone who requests
it. But several other open-source licenses exist that do not
impose this condition.
Sowing
fear, uncertainty, and doubt
Microsoft's
attacks are a classic example of what industry old-timers call
a FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) campaign.
The logic
of Microsoft's FUD required it to deny that the company had
ever incorporated open-source software in its own code or had
used open-source code in the operation of its business. Microsoft's
cover was blown on 18 June when The Wall Street Journal printed
what the community of hackers who built Linux and the Web and
the Internet itself have known for years--first, that many of
Microsoft Windows' network functions show telltale signs of
having been adapted from the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution
(BSD) of Unix code, and second, that Microsoft's free Hotmail
operation relies on the open-source FreeBSD operating system
for its mission-critical servers because Windows systems just
aren't robust enough to handle the load.
Microsoft's
spokespeople at first denied this. Two days later, they admitted
it. But they are going to have trouble answering a larger question:
if open-source software is good enough for Microsoft, why is
the company claiming that it's bad for everybody else?
It doesn't
take rocket science or extrasensory perception to figure out
the answer to that question. It's because, as Microsoft employees
wrote two years ago, in the leaked internal memoranda that became
infamous as the Halloween Documents, open source poses a threat
to Microsoft's monopoly lock on its customers that its traditional
development and business practices cannot effectively counter.
Technically,
peer-reviewed open-source code has proven clearly superior to
Microsoft's closed-source products in reliability, performance,
scalability, and security. Economically, the low cost and flexibility
of open-source code has proven a winning argument in markets
as disparate as embedded systems and high-end Internet and data-center
server machines like the boxes running Microsoft's Hotmail service.
Losing
market share
Microsoft
still owns 92 percent of the desktop market, but that market
is saturating; hardware sales are down, and the company is having
trouble persuading buyers of its older desktop operating systems--like
Windows 95, 98, and NT 4.0--that they need to upgrade en
masse. In contrast, according to figures from market researcher
Netcraft, the number of Linux machines being installed each
month for Web service alone dwarfs unit volumes for Windows
2000. In other words, Microsoft's strategic master plan to lock
down corporate data centers as tightly as it holds the desktop
has already been decisively derailed.
Microsoft's
intention is to persuade customers not to use open-source code
by claiming it will force proprietary software into the public
domain
What's
more, according to other market researchers like International
Data Group, Boston, and D.H. Brown Associates Inc., Port Chester,
N.Y., Microsoft is actually losing share to Linux and the open-source
BSD operating systems in the high-end corporate computing markets
it had been relying on to fuel its future expansion. Worse,
the packaged-software business is increasingly looking like
a loser as falling hardware prices erode the fat margins that
have supported Microsoft's high Windows and Office license fees.
Microsoft's
strategists may deny all this in public, but you can bet they're
cold-eyed realists about it in private. They're finding it increasingly
difficult to see where future revenues to fuel an ever-rising
stock price will come from in the markets they control. This
explains Microsoft's bet-the-company .NET network computing
strategy. They're trying to leverage their desktop monopoly
into a lock on critical network services like digital identity
and authentication while Microsoft still has the winner's mystique
and raw financial mass to pull off such a power play.
Fighting
unthinkable thoughts
For that
ambition, open source is a very serious problem. It does not
merely erode Microsoft's market share but calls into question
all the assumptions that make One Big Closed Vendor look attractive
to information technology (IT) managers. What if open standards
and peer review were good enough to solve real-world interoperability
problems without a single vendor running the show? What if software
were a commodity, with multiple providers competing on service?
What if we didn't have to spend what Deutsche Banc's Alex Brown
estimates to be more than 30 percent of our IT budgets on license
fees and another 40 percent on solutions to work around software-integration
problems created or exacerbated by lack of access to the source
code?
Microsoft
can't live with its customers even thinking these thoughts.
As the Halloween Documents conceded, the technical case for
open source is solid, even overwhelming, once the political
and cultural barriers to considering it have fallen. What customers
think about today, they can act on tomorrow--and when they do,
Microsoft will meet the same ignominious fate as every other
busted technology monopoly.
It is only
against this background that Microsoft's increasingly desperate
propaganda campaign--including the big lies that The Wall Street
Journal caught it telling--make sense. The Halloween Documents
observed that Microsoft must counterattack "a process, not a
company." They must disrupt and destroy the Internet-centered
culture that produces open-source code. They must make open
source unthinkable, or outright illegal, if their monopolistic
business model is to survive.
Trying
to frighten customers with the line that open-source hackers
are all a bunch of shaggy-bearded GPL-waving communards plotting
to abscond with everybody's intellectual property void is one
arm of the attack. It's easy to imagine others--perhaps a flurry
of high-profile, contributory-infringement patent or Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prosecutions directed against
both developers and large corporate users.
Indeed,
it may well be that the only reason we haven't already seen
a legal attack is that there already are large corporations
with enough of a vested interest in open-source software (such
as IBM) to field their own platoons of lawyers. The last thing
Microsoft needs is more legal trench warfare with an adversary
close to its own size.
Even if
the courts won't help Microsoft, a state legislature might.
There is widespread speculation in the open-source community
that Microsoft's portrait of Linux as an "intellectual-property
destroyer" may be aimed as much at federal and state legislators
as it is at corporate customers. These worthies have already
demonstrated (via the DMCA, the Uniform Computer Information
Transactions Act, and absurd copyright term extensions) that
they'll cooperate in quite a bit of anti-competitive market
rigging if it's dressed up as intellectual-property protection.
Perhaps this is the outcome Microsoft is hoping for.
If so,
it's a high-risk, though high-gain, strategy. Microsoft was
doing better at holding down Linux's growth curve when its FUD
campaign was mainly retailed directly to its big customers over
drinks and rounds of golf, while it dismissed open source in
public as irrelevant. By attacking open source, by focusing
attention on its supposed dangers, Microsoft's strategists are
inviting a public debate on the merits that has already begun
to backfire in ways dangerous to them.
When
truth is not a friend
Microsoft
is telling lies because the truth is not its friend in this
argument. And every time it's caught in a falsehood, open-source
advocates will be all over Microsoft, crucifying the company
with its own distortions and "misstatements." We don't really
have to fight the propaganda air war to better than a draw,
either. Slowly, surely, we're winning the computing ground war
everywhere that overworked engineers are fed up with an endless
cycle of reboots, registry creep, gaping security holes, dynamically
loading library clashes, and Windows' Blue Screen of Death.
In the
open-source community, we have a favorite quote from Mohandas
K. Gandhi about what happens when you do nonviolent grassroots
activism properly: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at
you. Then they fight you. Then you win." If Gandhi was right,
Microsoft's decision to escalate to a public propaganda war
actually tells us we're close to victory.
That would
be a good thing for everybody, because, easy as it is to forget
sometimes, the open- versus closed-source argument is not just
a religious snit between rival gangs of computer geeks. The
outcome matters, it matters profoundly, and it matters not just
to our economy but to the future shape of our entire civilization.
Will our communications infrastructure be an open forum of a
billion equals or one in which crucial channels are locked down
by an unholy symbiosis of monopolies and monopoly-granting governments?
Will computer users control the software they run, or be controlled
themselves?
In the
open-source community, we know where we stand on these questions.
We know where Microsoft stands, too. Victory matters.
