The Halloween Documents

Introduction

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.

Eric Raymond