In a clear admission that Linux poses a significant threat to Microsoft's corporate supremacy, a new anti-Linux campaign (which, confusingly, is titled "Get the Facts on Windows and Linux�) will do its best to extol the virtues of Microsoft software at the expense of the many free alternatives.

The three major issues on which the campaign focuses are HR costs, operation costs, and speed of development:

The claims bear that usual pungency of over-zealous marketing and colourful dummy graphs. Most impressive is the addition of actual percentage figures:

Though I'm unsure from where exactly those statistics derive, they may very well be true in some cases (though not for the reason Microsoft would imply). Put simply, Windows is often cheaper than an alternative system purely because it's already implemented. Staff are comfortable with the user interface, (competent) network administrators have ironed out the bugs and come to grips with relevant idiosyncrasies, and the network infrastructure is already there.

However, if the costs of establishing a system architecture tabula rasa were examined, then not even the costs of retraining and transition could cancel out the enormous savings in licensing fees that switching to open source software would yield.

At any rate, the very characteristic of open source software that poses the greatest threat to Microsoft (namely, its distributed and contributory nature) cripples its ability to make any kind of effective response. Lacking the resources and centralised command structure of their corporate brethren, groups like the fud and Linux zealot propaganda miss the point somewhat. Choosing an operating system isn't always about cost; productivity is also an important factor, and to this end, both Windows and *nix have a part to play.