Virtual Linux Open source News - Novell turns to statistics

You know that a company is on its last legs trying to prove something when it turns to surveys in order to drive home a point. Novell has reached that stage in trying to plug its deal with Microsoft.

Today we have a survey, jointly sponsored by Novell and Microsoft (nowadays that's quite common), to measure how customers feel about interoperability between vendors. That's taken to mean that the same percentage approve of the entire deal which Novell struck with Microsoft on November 2.

The questions put to the customers do not include any mention of the fallout of the patent aspect of the deal, the aspect which has raised the most questions. But then why would you raise such hairy issues? The figures would probably get skewed. Bear in mind, this is a survey of just 201 so-called IT decision makers. There's a margin of error of nearly six percent.

Surveys are so discredited these days, especially when tech companies are involved, that few people pay attention to them anymore. It's pretty easy to obtain the results you want by asking the right questions. The glass can be half-full or half-empty, it all depends on the queries.

As expected, the survey comes out with glowing endorsement of the deal - the customers surveyed overwhemlmingly approve of the deal, believing it will "benefit IT customers and increase interoperability of IT systems." The rest of the results are here - not that they are news, they are all as expected.

But what about the reaction of developers who create most of the software which Novell sells as part of its GNU/Linux systems? Does their opinion count for something? Were these decision-makers asked if they had fears about newer versions of software which is under the GPL not being available to them if they continued running SuSE/Linux? Were they even aware of this possibility?

Did these customers have an inkling that there's an organisation called the Free Software Foundation that has the copyright on a substantial portion of the software that goes into any GNU/Linux distribution? Or were they informed that a little project that produces software called Samba - which has come to epitomise interoperability between Windows and Linux - will be moving to the next version of the GPL in March next year, making it impossible for Novell to include the same in its GNU/Linux distribution?

If not, then this survey has been carried out in what I would term (to use management-speak) an "information-poor environment". If people are ignorant of the facts, how can they respond to questions in an informed manner? Ponder this: if some of these businesses which use GNU/Linux suddenly became unable to use it anymore because their supplier has lost a case against Microsoft would their answers to the survey be any different?

Have any of the customers considered that by forming an alliance with Microsoft, Novell is actually promoting some kind of vendor lock-in? One of the strengths of GNU/Linux has awlays been that you can switch between distributions with some ease.

Did any customer understand that the interoperability part of the deal may result in SUSE/Linux being customised to the extent that other distributions cannot be used as a drop-in replacement? How would that help if Novell suddenly went out of business?

The late Benjamin Disraeli once characterised statistics as the third and worst form of deception. His reasoning is as valid today as it was then.

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