The future of the FUD mill

It is not hard to poke holes in the study, of course. Somehow it was possible to set up an intranet server on Windows with zero steps - but it still took seven minutes. Somehow the report didn't comment on the discouraging time per step required to accomplish this task on Windows. Errors made by the (Microsoft-hired) consultants performing the Linux installation were counted as steps. Tasks like checking the system with nmap were also counted. Setting up remote administration took 100 steps; we could suggest a shorter way of doing that:

1. Enable sshd.

The VeriTest people, instead, set out on a series of tasks involving installing the kernel source, setting up PPTP, and carrying out several tasks on the Windows client - all of which counted as steps, of course.

One could go on about this report for a long time; see, for example, the letter from Leon Brooks on this week's Letters Page. The more interesting development, however, is that Forrester Research has, after having Microsoft trumpet one of its studies, issued this statement on the integrity of its reports.

Forrester, in other words, is getting out of the analyst-for-hire FUD business. Given that this business can only be lucrative, Forrester's decision to leave it behind is worthy of note.

FUD-for-hire has long been an important business tool in the technology world. Analysts have been happy to have the business, and they have been able to live with the fact that their output always seems to support the sponsor's agenda. Technical journalists have long liked these reports; they can easily be cast into a story without requiring much in the way of creative or critical thought. The whole system worked smoothly as a way of shaping public perception of technology products.

Something has happened over the last decade or so, however. The net has made it easy for interested parties to rip apart biased or poorly-done studies. And the rise of free software has greatly increased the number of people who feel some sort of ownership interest in the systems they use. As a result, anybody publishing a report critical of free software had better be very sure of his ground, because that report will be subjected to intense scrutiny. Some of the people performing that scrutiny will know far more about the subject manner than the analysts who wrote the text, and they will not be afraid to say, in public, what they think. Shoddy research and skewed studies do not fare well in the modern environment.

It has been noted for years that FUD attacks on Linux tend to backfire; even Microsoft has commented on this fact. The combination of the net and the Linux community has managed to neutralize - or at least strongly diminish the effect of - FUD. Analyst companies which are seen as taking part in outright FUD attempts have seen their own credibility suffer; remember MindCraft? Now some analyst companies, concerned about the perception of their integrity, are realizing that the FUD business is a poor place to be in the long run. That is a victory for the Linux community, and for the level of technology industry discourse in general.

#./nmap -A -T4 -F www.sun.com

Starting nmap 3.48 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2003-10-08 22:59 PDT
Warning:  OS detection will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1 open and 1 closed TCP port
Interesting ports on 64.124.140.199.sun.com (64.124.140.199):
(The 1209 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered)
PORT    STATE SERVICE  VERSION
80/tcp  open  http     SunONE WebServer 6.0
443/tcp open  ssl/http SunONE WebServer 6.0
...