In a new study (PDF) from Enterprise Management Associates, a technology research and analysis firm, GNU/Linux is deployed faster, has less (or no) downtime, and in general costs less to administer than most other operating systems in an enterprise environment. Many GNU/Linux system administrators and users have known since its inception that Microsoft's Get The Facts anti-Linux ad campaign was bunk, but this new study is the first to offer something beyond sporadic Internet rumors and individual testimonials.

Important details about the study

The study encompassed 200 sysadmins working for a variety of different multimillion-dollar businesses. About half of the study subjects' employers had an annual income of under US $5 million, and most of the respondents worked in the telecommunications, computer hardware or software, consulting, education, or service provider industries. The rest were a smattering of various other fields, from health care to entertainment.

Study data was collected from interviews with CIOs and IT managers, a self-selecting Web survey, and telephone surveys from a random sample of thousands of IT businesses. Full details of the exact survey procedures were not available at the time of this writing; some of the involved processes may not produce reliable sample data.

So who paid for this? That's always an important question with analyst studies, as it usually implies influence from the people who financed it. EMA insists in their report that those who provided funding had no influence on the collected data or the results of the study. The two financial backers in this instance were Levanta, a GNU/Linux-based enterprise hardware and software services company; and the Open Source Development Lab, which currently employs some of the world's most talented and hardworking free software programmers.

Get what facts?

To begin with, EMA did not intend for the study to compare GNU/Linux and Windows directly; it was meant to determine if using GNU/Linux on enterprise-level servers were undermined by high management costs. This notion is the main thrust of the Get The Facts ad campaign. The new EMA study suggests that the data collected in Get The Facts is out of date or misleading.

Visiting Microsoft's Get The Facts site reveals many whitepapers and case studies, but with noticeable flaws: every one of them relies on old data, theoretical data, or highly specialized situations in which a company had financial incentives (such as "leveraging" their "existing Windows assets" (a cute way of saying that they will re-use old computers and Windows licenses) to unstated retraining costs and high-level contracts with software and service vendors) to stay with Windows rather than switch to GNU/Linux. In essence, Get The Facts is not one study, but a collection of several studies that have been skewed or interpreted in ways that, under a minimal level of scrutiny, do not hold any water. This is nothing new; analysts and journalists have been saying these things for years. Now, however, the EMA study uses actual data to refute Microsoft's claims.

Copyright 2006 Jem Matzan.