Non-geeks look away now.
You may not have seen this. Note the parallels with studies funded by the motor lobby, which quietly
exclude great chunks of costs.
Windows for devices cheaper than Linux-study
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Wed July 16, 2003 08:50 PM ET
SEATTLE, July 16 (Reuters) - The cost of developing software for consumer electronics, handheld
computers, cash registers and other devices using Linux costs more than with Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O
software, according to a study funded by the world's largest software maker released on Wednesday.
The report, written by Jerry Krasner, a former Boston University professor who now heads Embedded
Market Forecasters, said that developing Windows-based software for devices is completed about 43
percent faster at a quarter of the cost of Linux-based systems.
Linux, which can be copied and modified freely unlike Microsoft's operating system, has gained
ground as a rival to Microsoft, whose software runs on more than 90 percent of the world's personal
computers.
Krasner said that he measured the time needed and the cost of paying engineers to develop software
for devices, or embedded software, for both Windows and Linux.
"This may emerge as the disruptive (cost) model in the industry," Krasner said.
For all Windows embedded software, Krasner found that it took 8.1 months to bring products to
market, compared with 14.3 months for embedded Linux software.
For all Windows embedded software, Krasner found that it cost $479,925, on average, to pay software
engineers for a development project, compared with $1.88 million for Linux embedded.
Krasner said that an independent research firm gathered data from 100 original equipment
manufacturers, which he then used to formulate his results. The study was funded by Redmond,
Washington-based Microsoft.
Microsoft commissioned a study last year that showed that the cost of using Linux for servers
managing computer networks was higher than Windows for four out of every five tasks.
So as long as you ignore the recurring costs (think licensing), Windows is allegedly cheaper. It
must be because Microsoft paid someone to say so. How were the Evil Empire able to increase profits
by 25% despite global economic gloom and growing competition in their core market? By "leveraging"
licensing.
Me, I'll stick with the evidence of my own eyes. We recently decided to go with a non-standard build
of Linux on our web servers, which meant compiling our own kernel. To build and deploy the kernel on
three different servers took less time than it took me this afternoon to build a stock Windows
server straight out of the box - and I have never actually built a Linux kernel before!
Meanwhile the Critical Updates (often to components you didn't want on a server in the first place)
keep flowing. Nine this month and still counting...
Guy
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** WARNING ** This posting may contain traces of irony. chapmancentral.comchapmancentral.comOpen ↗ [currently
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