Why We Fight — An Anti-Linuxarian Manifesto

WHEREAS, the nearly three and a half years since the terrible events of 1999-11-05 has exposed the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the computer scientists, businessmen, and programmers operating within conventional technical categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive Open Sourcery; by apologizing for GNU terrorist acts; by propounding squalid theories of equivalence between the X license and the BSD license; and by blaming the victims of evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-Unix' measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the central liberties of Microsoft Corporation; and in some cases by rhetorically descending to almost the same level of anti-Microsoftism as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Microserfs from whom we expected more self-interest have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war back to the aggressors is our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the premises of the anti-Linuxarian position:

1. THAT Microsoft civilization is threatened with the specter of a free-software ecology perpetrated by open, free, and redistributable programs placed in the hands of mere users by rogue programmers;

2. THAT the rogues and their FSF sponsors have declared and are pursuing a war not against the vices of MS civilization but against its core virtues: against the freedom of Windows and IE and .NET, against the life of reason; against the supremacy of the Wintel way of life, against monoculture and astroturfing; against, indeed, all the qualities which separate civilized Microserfs from savagery, slavery, and RMS-style fanaticism;

3. THAT no corrections of bugs or MS licensing, or concessions to the ISVs, or actions taken against total lack of security, or efforts to conceal our worldwide monopoly, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;

4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not be dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of free licensing and the GPL on the Windows source;

5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use high-quality free programs as fifth columns to starve investors in thousands of innocent dot-coms, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated the scope of their future malice even without weapons of mass bankruptification;

6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue entities such as CRG, FSF, and OSAF; groups that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of software that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit anti-Windows atrocities by a thousandfold;

7. THAT Richard Stallman poses a particularly clear and present danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts to develop the GNU Hurd, his use of the GCC compilers even on his own software, his demonstrated willingness to commit ideological aggression against peaceful fellow travelers, and his known links to the GNU terror network in Cambridge and elsewhere.

WE THEREFORE DECLARE that both the Linux terrorists and their corporate sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of mankind, to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause' of Linuxist terrorism lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of Open Source software and not in any significant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of the war against Linuxism must be to displace and discredit those animating ideas.

WE ENDORSE, as a self-serving power grab by the most trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right to create free software, and the right of peaceable disassembly, and the right to Linuxize users' systems; and we strenuously support business-friendly measures such as the imposition of national processor IDs and NSA-level surveillance and cracking of private PCs as a self-help action;

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of wiredness brings out the best in both individual human beings and corporations, we reject the alternative of ceding to the world's barbarians the exclusive privilege of high-caffeine cola;

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and imprison or deport individual members of the anti-DCMA terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied legal action against the rogue companies that support Linux terrorism, both as a means of alleviating the immediate threat to our profits and of deterring future sponsorship of terrorism by the threat of cutthroat competition.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the MS police cannot and should not be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm MS Office with logic bombs, and to recognize as well the ordinary Windows programmer's right and duty to respond to emulation by free software with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future legal/political/technical blackmail of MS, the forcible bankruptcy of Sun, HP, and of other companies that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of open-source software; and the Chapter 11-ing of those companies until such time as the root causes of free software have been eradicated from their corporate cultures.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of MS-kind that gives aid and comfort to free software programmers operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left — the moral blindness that refuses to recognize that monoculture, desktop monopoly, and the theft of others' ideas have made Microsoft a fundamentally better place than any culture in which loadable modules, 'process killings', and CR/LF mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand MSDOS-ism or as a .NET-chauvinist agenda that echoes the religious absolutism of our enemies.

WE ARE EMPLOYEES OF A CORPORATION, and we hold that corporation to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it to the end. We will fight for Microsoft in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds, or we will find ourselves out on the street.

WE HAVE AWAKENED; we have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Matzes and Larrys and Guidos of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much to enable and excuse their evil. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.

WE SHALL DEMAND as shareholders and taxpayers that those we delegate to pursue the war against Linuxism with an unflagging will to victory and all means necessary — while remaining always mindful that we must not become what we fight (fat chance!);

WE SHALL REMEMBER that Microsoft's keenest weapons are FUD and the press release; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies from which Microsoft-hatred is built; and that we must also be vigilant against accidental releases of truth from our own side, lest our victories become tainted and hollow, sowing trouble for our corporate future.

WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these challenges; we shall not be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor yet by fear of ourselves;

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the apologists; and we shall fight the Linuxists and fanatics, and we shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in business, crushing their dreams of the world domination that rightly belongs to us; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our wealth and mindshare to win their users and junior programmers to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of all the nameless copies of Windows itself which have been defenestrated by Linux terrorists and rogue corporations:

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.