IBM, in conjunction with analyst firm Robert Frances Group (RFG), released a study that found Linux to be less expensive than Windows. The investigation determined that Linux is 40 percent cheaper to purchase, implement and run on x86 systems than Windows. The fact that IBM is behind it is not the only flaw in this study. There is a piece of the survey that IBM likely doesn’t want you to know about. Buried at the bottom of the report, it turns out, are RFG’s findings that over a three-year period Windows is actually less expensive to support and administer than Linux on similar hardware. RFG broke costs out into the categories of hardware acquisition, software license and maintenance, and application server support and administration. When it comes to service and support, Windows cost survey participants $947 the first year, and $797 each of the next two years, for a 3-year sum of $2,541. Linux, on the other hand, was $1,559 for the first year and $1,289 for each of the subsequent two years, totaling $4,137. An even bigger surprise is that Solaris service and support was less expensive than either Windows or Linux. Solaris ran $916 for the first year, $777 per year for the next two, and snuck in under Windows at $2,470. That alone doesn’t discredit the report, and I encourage IT folks to download the PDF, read the full report, and take the two other categories under consideration because there is money to be saved in hardware acquisition and software licensing by opting for Linux. Not that I needed an analyst report to understand that. As measured for purposes of this study, the hardware for Linux cost $13,191, compared to Windows’ $23,242. Licensing and maintenance costs were roughly double for Windows, which was $12,114 to that of Linux at $6,424.The report stated that the TCO of Linux is $40,149, Windows is $67,559 and Solaris costs $86,478. Those cost figures are “based on a three-year period of ownership for a system supporting 100,000 operations per second on the SPECjbb benchmark,” the analyst firm wrote in its report. So over 3 years a Linux application server is $27,410 less expensive than Windows, and some $9,000 less per year if broken out that way. Given that the $9,000 applies on a per-server basis, it is a substantial savings for companies with hundreds or thousands of servers. And for smaller companies with tighter budgets, the cost savings is just as worthwhile, presuming the other pieces of the IT puzzle, namely skilled staff, line up accordingly. But there is another, potentially bigger, problem with this report: The analyst firm polled IT execs at only 20 companies.So, out of all the companies in all the world, they only surveyed 20. The experience of so few people is an inadequate foundation on which to make broad sweeping claims, such as Linux is cheaper than Windows, or vice versa, and thus prohibits IT from taking the study entirely seriously. Never take vendor-sponsored reports at face-value. Never. And this applies just as much to Microsoft’s Get the Facts campaign. Technology Industry