Microsoft has introduced its Get The Facts campaign in SA, which it says aims to help people understand the benefits and risks associated with open source software (OSS) and non-open source software.
The announcement follows the Go Open Source campaign launched this week by the Shuttleworth Foundation, HP and the CSIR, which pledges R18 million to promote OSS to the masses over the next two years.
However, Gordon Frazer, MD of Microsoft SA, says it is a complete coincidence that the campaigns have been announced at the same time.
"Personally, I think the two campaigns running at the same time is quite good as they will help to make the market more aware. The Get The Facts campaign is running in 29 countries after it was launched last year," he says.
The campaign focuses on six areas: the supposed lower cost of OSS, and the claims that it is more secure, better supported, has an advantage because its source code can be viewed, has superior performance and can run on lower-end hardware.
Elaborating on the campaign, Albie Bester, platform strategy manager at Microsoft SA, says the research done for the campaign makes the consumer aware that OSS is not necessarily cheaper when one includes support costs, that OSS also has security issues, is not necessarily better supported, is not the only software that makes its source code available to be viewed, and does not always have better performance or work on lower-end software.
While Microsoft uses an International Data Corporation (IDC) report to back its argument, doubt was cast on the validity of the report when one of the study`s authors claimed the results were rigged. IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky said scenarios were selected that "would inevitably be more costly using Linux".
Microsoft insists it didn`t rig the contest and chose the most popular uses for the software.
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