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By Root 1908 0

were opportunities in this. Hackers could claim to be public agents. The corporate world, meanwhile, could make money by touting "trusted systems" and deploying claims about security. Another part of that world could develop businesses of prevention, detection, and policing. And at the same time, alternatives to proprietorial software proliferated, staking their own moral and economic claims. Richard Stallman at MIT became their best-known and most forthright advocate. Stallman held that the creation and circulation of "free" software-that is, code independent of proprietary restrictions-was a matter of the constitution of communities. He complained that in the digital realm exclusive properties made "pirates" out ofwhat otherwise would be merely good, helpful neighbors. That is, the question of property was, as always, a matter of political philosophy, with the "pirate" label indicating that this was the modern counterpart to debates about perpetual rights and freedom of speech in the Enlightenment. Stallman's was quite a radical position, however, and commercial and would-be commercial allies grew leery of it. In 1998 they came up with the alternative designation "open source." Open-source software was not quite the same thing as free software, because open-source denizens could countenance the integration of code into subsequent products distributed on a proprietary model.36 But the two did share the ideal of the programmer as citizen and craftsperson, and theywould often be paired together under the acronym FOSS (for free and open-source software).

Proprietary software concerns struggled to come up with a strategy to deal with open-source work. Some, IBM being the most prominent, reconciled with open source. Microsoft did not, and as it rose to dominance it struggled to appreciate the nature of the challenge. A remarkable revelation of its strategic perceptions came in the fall of 1998, bywhich time open source had proved itself a lasting enterprise. That October, an internal memorandum was leaked to the open-source proponent Eric Raymond. It had been written by a Microsoft official named Vinod Valloppillil, and bore the title Open Source Software: A (New?) Development Methodology? A second document appeared shortly after, with more following in later months.37Together, these "Halloween documents," as theybecame known, demonstrated that (contrary to Microsoft's public stance at the time) the corporation saw open-source conventions as posing a serious challenge. More significant, however, was what they revealed about Microsoft's efforts to articulate the nature of that challenge and respond to it.

Open source, the initial memorandum conceded, had advantages "not replicable with our current licensing model." It therefore presented "a long term developer mindshare threat." Contrary to what was then Microsoft's public stance, large projects drawing upon communities of expertise extending across continents had already demonstrated the viability of FOSS, and robust legal mechanisms such as the GNU Public License were sufficient to sustain them. "Very dramatic evidence" existed already indicating that the quality of open-source software equaled or exceeded that of proprietary. Not least, the Internet operated largely atop open-source code. In short, open source had the all-important asset: "credibility." Valloppillil reasoned, therefore, that Microsoft was in the difficult position of having to "target" not a specific competitor, but a "process," and one that had earned the trust it enjoyed. He considered buying a solution: Microsoft could simply monitor open-source discussion groups and hire all the outstanding coders (AT&T's old prewar strategy in telecommunications). But that was less a satisfactory response than a backhanded compliment to the virtues of FOSS. His real proposal was more radical.

Valloppillil mooted a strategy of "de-commoditizing" the standards by which commonly used programs interacted with each other. These standards (good examples would be theTCP/IP protocol used in Internet communications, or the