Criticism By Microsoft
In 2004, Microsoft initiated its Get the Facts campaign, which specifically criticized Linux server usage. In particular, it claimed that the vulnerabilities of Windows are fewer in number than those of Linux distributions, that Windows is more reliable and secure than Linux, that the total cost of ownership of Linux is higher (due to complexity, acquisition costs, and support costs), that use of Linux places a burden of liability on businesses, and that "Linux vendors provide little, if any indemnification coverage." In addition, the corporation published various studies in an attempt to prove this – the factuality of which has been heavily disputed by different authors who claim that Microsoft's comparisons are flawed. Many Linux distributors now offer indemnification to customers.
Internal Microsoft reports from the Halloween documents leak have presented conflicting views. Particularly documents from 1998 and 1999 ceded that "Linux … is trusted in mission critical applications, and – due to its open source code – has a long term credibility which exceeds many other competitive OS's", "An advanced Win32 GUI user would have a short learning cycle to become productive ", "Long term, my simple experiments do indicate that Linux has a chance at the desktop market …", and "Overall respondents felt the most compelling reason to support OSS was that it 'Offers a low total cost of ownership (TCO)'."
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“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)