Summary: With the Burton Group inside of it and with Microsoft contracts in the pipeline, the Gartner Group carries on with its belittlement of ODF (including the obligatory FOSS bashing) while it is promoting Microsoft lock-in like OOXML
Andrea Di Maio from the Gartner Group is at it again. We previously wrote about him in [1, 2, 3, 4], even in relation to the OOXML blunder in Australia last week [1, 2, 3, 4]. As a very quick refresher, Gartner threw FUD at ODF after an unrelated verdict against Microsoft. The Gartner FUDmeister was proven to be wrong shortly afterwards. His claims were utterly false and they injured ODF's reputation nonetheless. Just before that, another FUDmeister from Gartner (one who works closely with Microsoft) promoted OOXML and insulted ODF [1, 2]. These people from Gartner (3 examples given in this case) are being paid for it, this is not a public service. In the latest FOSS-hostile piece from Andrea Di Maio (this guy has many) he includes this bit which says:
Gartner Research and Gartner Consulting are two separate organizations, although both part of Gartner
Yes, it figures. So the same firm and same people (Gartner) basically serve a company one day and pretend to just do "research" another day. No room for bias there, eh? We have shown many crude examples of bias and there are even lawsuits about the conflict of interest. All those attacks on ODF help show how Gartner works (favouring the clients who pay) and what a corruptible company it really is. Gartner
bought the Burton Group, which was one of the leading smearers of ODF at the time [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7] (Microsoft paid for it and later employed some staff from the Burton Group).
Needless to say, ODF proponents are extremely unhappy with what Gartner is doing these days. Rob Weir
has just told Bob Sutor (both are IBM's main ODF people):
Ironic that of all the things open source has done, DiMaio narrowly focuses on their rhetoric
Yes, Gartner also likes to smear Free/libre software because the paradigm offers no contract work to Gartner.
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