By silicon.com, 30 August 2005 17:55
Microsoft has received a cool response from the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) over its offer to jointly sponsor research into total cost of ownership of Windows versus Linux.
Of course, the suggestion of joint research doesn't mean that Microsoft is beginning to warm to open source.
Instead it is perhaps more likely a reflection that the software giant feels it has lost the moral high ground to the Linux camp, and by holding out this olive branch is seeking to regain it.
And it's understandable that OSDL - home of Linus Torvalds - would be a little cautious about getting involved with anything Microsoft suggests.
As OSDL boss Stuart Cohen told silicon.com, if the research went ahead, Microsoft could surely find in the results reasons why companies shouldn't adopt open source - and then spend millions to make sure everybody knew about it.
And of course, the marketing muscle that Microsoft can bring to bear is much greater than the OSDL or any Linux vendor could ever hope to muster.
In any case, it's probably impossible to come down with a final once-and-for-all answer as to whether Linux or Windows offers better total cost of ownership for every company.
But as it is one of the biggest decisions that many IT departments are trying to make at the moment, any new information would be welcome.
So while it's understandable that OSDL wanted to pass on this particular offer, some may see this as a missed opportunity.
The biggest victims of all this are the users - because they are left without the proper tools to help them choose the right operating system for their needs.
Comments
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1. Anon
Past behaviour is a good indication of future behaviour.
2. David F. Skoll
The columnist writes:
The biggest victims of all this are the users - because they are left without the proper tools to help them choose the right operating system for their needs.
That's utter nonsense. The result of this "study" would have been FUD. Any user who can't choose the right operating system for his needs without reading a "study" doesn't deserve to be in charge of a computer.
3. anonymous
The kind of studies in Microsoft's 'Get the Facts' campaign do not provide any useful information to users. They are either paid-for studies, ie. no better than any other advertising material produced by their marketing department, or selective quoting of other studies to only pick out the bits that show MS products in a good light.
Even when it comes to the (rare) unbiased or objective study IT needs of different organisations are usually too complex and too specific to enable accurate comparisons. Given MS's past record on paying supposedly indepedent analyst groups to produce studies which parrot their marketing lines there is no possible way anything coming out of MS could ever be considered to have any credibility.
As your article states the only think that would happen if OSDL had gone into a partnership with MS on this is that MS would pick the one line out of 100 pages that appeared to favour them and then use their huge marketing budget to trumpet that. All the while with the suggestion that it's a joint study lending credibility to the whole thing that it wasn't just another MS paid-for study.
They really are devious, deceptive and untrustworthy people over at MS, and the OSDL people were right to want to have nothing to do with them.
4. slack
you would have to be lawyered up to believe that anything m$ did. They did the right thing.. although it may have been very tempting..
5. anonymous
you have no idea what you're talking about
6. Richard Steven Hack
Missed opportunity for who?
If in fact Microsoft was not sincere in its offer - and this is almost a certainty - then how would anyone other than Microsoft, including end users, have benefited?
More importantly, TCO is specific to a company. There is no industry-wide TCO model that can be followed.
A company that wants to know whether it can save money with Linux needs to know what Windows is costing it now, and then assess the costs of migration vs the ongoing costs of year after year of Microsoft license hikes, virus crashes, etc. ad nauseum.
It's not rocket science.
More importantly, TCO is essentially irrelevant. The important issue between Linux and Windows, and open source and commercial software in general, is the issue of flexibility and quality. Linux and open source have been demonstrated in studies to have higher quality code than commercial software. Various Linux distros have been demonstrated in studies to be faster at doing various tasks than Windows Server 2003.
More importantly, you can do anything you want with open source software to make it work the way you want it to work. You may have to devote some in-house talent to this, or hire outside talent (preferably the open source developers themselves, who can always use the money to further develop their software), but you can't do it AT ALL with commercial software.
And if there are any companies who really want to run their systems are pure vanilla COTS software, I'd like to know who they are. EVERY company, from the smallest to the largest, wants to do things a different way. NO commercial product is sufficiently adaptable to do this. And make no mistake, it costs you to lower yourself to the lowest common denominator user of a COTS product.
This may not apply to common end user software like browsers or spreadsheets, but anything that is classed as enterprise software certainly is affected by being closed and unmodifiable.
That is the kind of "soft cost" that gets omitted in TCO comparisons, but ends up being the most important cost to a company over time.
Unfortunately, most management in most companies is so incompetent that this sort of concept just floats by over their heads.
7. anonymous
Some points about this "Leader".
The "Leader" assumes Microsoft is the "leader" the "fuhrer" and the king of software.
It is not true, there are today more people more companies and more money involwed in OSS.
It also assumes that IT deparments and companys are unable to get "the facts" by themselves.
Compare Microsoft to a town built below sealevel where the leeves are breaking.
Every desperate idea is then tried to save the situation.
No luck this time.
8. Dom
"left without the proper tools to help them choose the right OS their needs.
Yet another invented legend.
Choosing the right OS is only a matter of
taking the responsabilty for yourself.
Most organizations have already some Windows implementation. Trying out Linux
cost nothing (try Debian).
Then compare the results.
9. Gerry Creager
Missed opportunity? Perhaps, but I think the contention that Microsoft would sieze on any single (Microsoft-) positive element in a report and publicize it out of context to the full extent of their coffers has to be considered a reality.
Microsoft has bought all the real competetion they could, and since they can't buy the open-source developers, they're trying to buy into the recognized development effort.
Wouldn't their time, effort and money be better spent trying to improve their rather horrid reputation for insequre, unaudited software, and perhaps in providing more timely patches (their time-to-patch is somewhat lame)?
10. W. Anderson
While Silicon.com may see computing users as "victims" of the non-cooperation between Microsoft and OSDL, there is every likelyhood that these users would be no more informed by joint projects results, since Microsoft in particular is apt to skew the results to completely obscure any reasonable conclusions, thus leaving uses even more confused.
11. Dominic Webb
Suggesting that end users are victims because another research paper will not grace the www is a little overstated.
The "proper tools" that companies should use are just that tools. Plural. Basing a decision on a sole TCO report, a white/research paper, is in 99.99999% of cases probably going to be (at a corporate level) negligent.
TCO/white/research papers are at best a guideline to a specific sector(s); at best a starting point in terms of further research.
Papers with narrow remits will be, by definition, narrow in their subject focus. That is to say a specific company or group of companies that have specific and substantially different business-to-operational requirements than 99.99999% of all other businesses.
For example, using a paper targeted at the dental sector as the sole "tool" in a textiles company is negligent.
While I agree that papers both research and TCO are useful and have there respective place, there is too much media hype and "silver bullet" type frenzy.
Take papers/TCO reports for what they are. They certainly are not the sole tool for making decisions, and unless you get an objective and credible paper/TCO that is relevant to your businesses operational/financial requirements, I would suggest you consign it to the low profile, circular filing cabinet.