The unethical bunch from Redmond is back to bribing professors, as part of a business model so notorious that we thought it had been buried. We already know that the Gates Foundation keeps buying the news to make coverage more favourable towards its goals (and in order to silence the many vocal critics). Microsoft is more or less the same (but more subtle) and just like the Gates Foundation, it funds professors who will become its front men.
Since I've not read the book - and I'd rather not shell out €£25.95 for the dubious pleasure of discovering where the errors originate - I'll limit myself to addressing the arguments outlined in the Economist review rather than worrying about where they originated.
But my main concern here is with the follow section:
Yet the finding that open-source advocates will like least is that free programs are not always cheaper. To be sure, the upfront cost of proprietary software is higher (although open-source programs are not always free). But companies that use such programs spend more on such things as learning to use them and making them work with other software.
Yes, it's a variant on that old FUD that free software is not actually free (gosh, really?) that Microsoft tried about ten years ago and gave up when it realised that nobody said it was when you took into account all the factors like paying wages. But leaving aside that this, too, is hardly news to anyone, let's just look at the central claim of the current incarnation of that FUD:
companies that use such programs spend more on such things as learning to use them and making them work with other software
So does the first part mean that learning to use a new piece of open source software is inherently harder than learning to use a new piece of proprietary software? I've not seen a single piece of research that suggests that. What I have seen documented is that people who are currently using Microsoft Office, say, find it harder to learn to use OpenOffice, say, than to continue using Microsoft Office. Which is, of course, a piece of wisdom that is once again firmly located at the very heart of the Land of the Bleedin' Obvious.
So, passing swiftly on in the hope that there might be a more substantive issue here, we have the second claim: that companies spend more on making open source work with “other software”. But wait, what could that “other software” refer to? Since it's not open source (because it's “other”, not open source) it is clearly proprietary; so the problem comes down to making open source work with proprietary software. And why might that be?
--Supreme Court Justice Jackson