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various compression algorithms used for audio and video files) were-and remain-basic infrastructure for the digital world. The common perception that digital culture is intrinsically universal rests on their being inpractice shared across manufacturers and nations. The Halloween strategy against FOSS would be for Microsoft to generate its own protocols that could be sold as better than any current standard, and to encourage programmers to write to them. This would inevitably render the standard nugatory, and thus make it very difficult for authors to produce code that would run predictably across different systems. Open source's vital asset of credibility would attenuate quickly in that situation. It was a plausible proposal, and in fact Microsoft adopted a similar strategy to combat the potential ofJava to supplant desktop with web computing. When the Halloween documents were revealed, opensource advocates assailed the idea as devious, Machiavellian, and technologically corrosive. The outcry was so fierce that Microsoft found itself forced to disown it.38

A more interesting contention about credibility, however, went relatively unnoticed amid this furor. The Halloween memo rested on a distinction between experienced programmers and users. A few experts might feel more secure with access to source code, it conceded. But the laity might well prefer what it called "the trust model + organizational credibility"-and rationally so. That is, the vast mass of lay users would probably vest their trust in not the code itself (which was inaccessible to them whether "open" or not) but the institution that authored and vouched for it. If Microsoft documented that an API (an interchange protocol between programs) acted in a certain way, then fewwould doubt that it did. Even an expert would reasonably credit a corporate author rather than exert an impractical prerogative to check every subroutine. Writ large, trust in the corporation might well supplant a supposed ability to vet code for oneself. Individual expertise could almost never stand against collective in practice. The point depended, of course, on open source being seen as a mass of individuals rather than an institution in its own right-but that played precisely to its advocates' own libertarian selfimage. In effect, the argument confronted the open-source community's championing of democratic access with the contention that trust, as much as individual knowledge, was the more fundamental basis of social and epistemic order, even in technical communities.39 Raymond suspected that the contention was flawed-only managers relied on "trust," he maintained, while real developers preferred access. But he conceded that this was a strategy by which Microsoft might actually win.

Significantly, however, although Valloppillil's proposal made the competition over credibility into one recognizable in terms ofprior computerindustry experience, it acknowledged that Microsoft could not win simply by dusting off and reusing tactics familiar from previous generations. The most traditionally insidious strategy in the industry was that known as fudding. The acronym FUD ("fear, uncertainty, and doubt") had originally been coined in the sixties apropos of apractice of the old monolith, IBM. It referred to the craft of insinuating suspicions about the longevity, security, and reliability of an opponent's software in order to deter the laity from buying it. The idea was that middle managers would prefer not to take risks in software purchasing, so that if they perceived uncertainties then they would opt for the security of a known program rather than buying a perhaps better alternative. The power of the strategy rested on a link between authorship and credibility that had been forged over centuries of piracy debates. Moreover, it ought to be more effective than ever now, as piracy and cracking encouraged a belief that the Net was a risky, uncertain place. And indeed, fudding was widely recognized to be a pervasive tactic in the Internet's early years. It represented the Net as a viper's nest.

But