Monday, August 29th, 2005, 5:08 pm
Microsoft-funded Benchmarks
Filed under:
Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)
ICROSOFT have recently raved about their Get the facts campaign [rel="nofollow"ed]. This vigorous campaign aims to convince the public that Windows Web servers outperform Linux equivalents. The study upon which this is based is Microsoft-funded, who often wave big bucks at the face of academic research groups, as well as employ them. Microsoft-funded researchers have been caught red-handed in the past. They published fraudulent or questionable results when surveying security among Windows, Mac and Linux. Initially, little did they bother to mention who funded the research, but eventually, all conclusions were binned in a sector-wide embargo due to these biassed reports.
Sadly, for any impartial review, there must be funds allocated, which are often provided in the form of greedy commercial backings. Likewise, when some results are available, money can be used to run a propaganda. The extent of such propaganda is related to the size of the bank account — something that Linux, for example, is adverse to.
Quite recently, Open Source bodies refused to fall for industrial benchmark temptation and be victims to Microsoft’s marketing tricks that are constantly being pulled. The latest such manipulative situation is a scenario involving an offer from Microsoft to fund 50% of a research comparing enterprise Linux performance to that of Windows.
Microsoft’s open-source point man Martin Taylor has expressed interest to
jointly develop a study on deploying Windows versus Linux with the Open
Source Development Lab (OSDL).…
“As far as working with Microsoft on a study, Microsoft could probably find
one negative line on Linux in a 100-page research report that it would
spend $10 million marketing while ignoring the other 99 pages,” he (OSDL
CEO) said in his e-mail to ZDNet Asia.
