Summary: Black Duck and now Univa too are making FUD part of their business model

A COMPANY called Univa is not new on the block (there is a Novell connection) and its proprietary software products are not new either. But it recently paid to smear FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) for the sake of making some sales, and that is just not ethical. Here are some resultant articles:

• Survey: Enterprises Love Open Source, But VARs Can Make It Better

  The survey was commissioned by Univa, which develops automation and management tools for data centers. The company is thus not a completely neutral player when it comes to managing demand for better support services for open source platforms (although the survey itself was conducted by an independent organization).





• 75% of Enterprises Encounter Problems When Using Free and Open Source Software, According to Univa Survey





• Most enterprises encounter problems with open source software





• Univa: Open source a problem for most businesses

  While nearly all businesses are using some kind of open source software at this point, the bulk also report having issues with open source programs. Problems which can lead to down time and lost revenue for businesses.

What we basically have here is Univa paying for some third party to say negative things about FOSS, which is supposed to result in press coverage that channels frightened readers to Univa, which offers proprietary software. This is the same business model as Black Duck's; just the other day we saw this press release [1, 2] and resultant coverage where Black Duck is trying to gain position of authority in the FOSS community ("Future Of Open Source Survey" is a Microsoft/Black Duck thing [1, 2]), despite having nothing to do with FOSS, just like Univa. Don't let proprietary software-centric and FOSS-exploiting entities control information and data about FOSS. They would love to do just that. They monetise ill-acquired authority. ⬆