Halloween documents
Internal Microsoft memos from 1998 that sized up open source as a threat and leaked just in time for Halloween.
In August 1998, Microsoft program manager Vinod Valloppillil wrote a memo on open source and Linux. It found its way to Eric S. Raymond, who published it with his own annotations around October 31. Microsoft confirmed it was genuine. The tone was strikingly sober: the development model worked, the quality was competitive, and a project with no company behind it could be neither bought out nor undercut on price.
What stuck was the proposal to "de-commoditize protocols" — extend open standards with proprietary additions until free software couldn't keep up. Later leaks were given the same label and a running number. For the community, the series was proof that Microsoft took the GPL world far more seriously than it admitted in public.