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Open source projects: Why it pays to keep quiet

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• Open Source

Ingrid Marson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 25 Nov 2005 15:15 GMT

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...costs by better tailoring licences to their needs.

But Volker Lendecke, a consultant at German open source consultancy SerNet, says Microsoft sometimes does a lot more than simply reduce its licence fees. He claims that one of his customers, who had migrated from Microsoft Windows NT4 to Samba across eight sites, was paid by Microsoft to migrate back to Windows and received five years of free support and licences.

However, while it seems Microsoft is ready to use the carrot to encourage companies around to its way of thinking there is also some anecdotal evidence that it can be prepared to use the stick. SerNet, which is involved in the European Commission's antitrust case against Microsoft, has passed on details of a case of Microsoft allegedly applying pressure to motivate a company not to publicise open source migrations.

Nobody willing to speak
"We have contacted the EC about these things, so they are aware of it," says Lendecke. "But nobody's willing to speak about it as everyone in the industry depends somewhat on Microsoft, so the information is of limited value to the European Commission — they need someone to stand up in front of the judge."

The European Commission would not comment on these specific cases or on the wider Microsoft antitrust case, but in September it reportedly said it was considering further charges against Microsoft, following "informal complaints".

The nature of these informal complaints is not yet known. But anecdotal evidence does suggest that companies come under pressure to keep quiet about their open source plans. "I know companies that are deploying Firefox or Thunderbird, but they aren't talking about it as they don't want to see an increase in their [Microsoft] Office licence price," said Mozilla Europe's president Tristan Nitot, speaking about migrations to Firefox, Mozilla's open source browser, at the FOSDEM open source software conference earlier this year. "Guys are really shy — it's the Munich Linux thing," he continued. "They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry."

An executive from a large vendor that works with open source confirmed that the fear of a licence fee increase puts some companies off publicising their migrations away from Microsoft software.

Microsoft: no penalties
However, Sunny Jensen Charlebois, a senior product manager in Microsoft's Worldwide Licensing and Pricing division, denies that it would increase its license fees if a customer migrated to Firefox.

"If a Microsoft customer chooses to use an application such as Firefox, it is not a violation of the Windows XP SP2 End User Licensing Agreement and accordingly there is no penalty of any kind. We have no restrictions on running a non-Microsoft browser on Windows XP," says Charlebois.

Charlebois admits that licence prices can change if customers migrate to open source in part of their infrastructure. "Our volume discounts are established by volume and product pools (we have three pools: desktop applications, desktop operating systems, and servers); and prices...

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