A few days ago we mentioned the latest miserable attempt to discredit GPLv3. The attempt has been extremely controversial and it came from no-one other than Microsoft, although Novell will certainly be pleased to see GPLv3 failing. A journalist comments on this study:

In any kind of research environment 34 respondents is not "more than sufficient" for making sweeping statements about the opinions of thousands of people.

Only 16 of those respondents were actually contributing to projects that use the GPL/LGPL

The deeper you look at this, the nastier the creases get. The study is flawed for so many reasons, yet it led to misleading headlines appearing in the news. And that's precisely what Microsoft wants. A popular SUSE blogged, who recently lost trust in Novell, comments on this 'study' as well.

Do I feel pity that Microsoft's efforts were misconstrued yet again? Hell, no. Microsoft has a long history of lying, cheating, and outright theft in the accomplishment of its singular goal of total domination in all markets it wants to play in. Microsoft went looking yet again to buy more support for their position with regard to the GPLv3. And Microsoft got sloppy in deciding to run with this particular study.