"...analysts sell out. It's their business model..."

--Microsoft, internal document [PDF]

Gartner was accused yesterday of setting the market's prices and rules, using disinformation. The streams of deception, or perception-shaping lies, just keep on coming. This time around, the Gartner Group gets echoed by InfoWorld, which had this to share.

"We advise clients that unless they have very strong IT resources, they should wait at least two years to think about deploying an open source database for mission-critical applications," says Colleen Graham, Gartner's longtime database market analyst.

As we noted right here, Oracle happens to be among the biggest subsidiaries of Gartner, so an open source database smear is only to be expected. That's just how this business works. We also saw it recently in the Financial Express where Frost & Sullivan, along with the Gartner Group, were responsible for some abominable FUD, with MySQL's market share claimed to be less than 1% (of course they selectively look at sales).

Gartner’s figures for annual sales of database software suggest that in 2005 and 2006, open source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL had a Marketshare of less than 1%. Out of $105-million business estimated in India during 2006, according to Gartner, the open source vendors had a 0.2% Marketshare against Microsoft SQL’s share of 41.5%, Oracle’s 28.4% and IBM DB2’s of 17.6%. Gartner says it has not yet finalised data for 2007.

Another study, by Frost & Sullivan, based on an analysis of 300 enterprises across India, indicates that the Indian database market in 2006 was $148.6million (which is higher than the Gartner figure) and is expected to reach $424 million by 2010. Whatever be the numbers in terms of size, Sun...

We wrote about Frost & Sullivan in [1, 2]. Both firms (Gartner and Frost & Sullivan) are paid by Microsoft and at least one is well paid by Oracle as well. It is rather absurd that they claim to be able to gauge Free software usage. See this post about the market share lie.

“Perceptions get propagated, yet they are seeded in newspapers which parrot so-called analysts on contract.”MySQL has been downloaded over 100,000,000 times. Downloaded, not sold. Additionally, it comes preinstalled with some free software distributions, including GNU/Linux. Adding to one's attention, how many blogs out there in India run MySQL? One should actually ponder how many blogs are not yet driven with Free software somewhere in the stack and also powered by MySQL.

The examples above are in full alignment with arguments you find elsewhere. FUD spreads. Perceptions get propagated, yet they are seeded in newspapers which parrot so-called analysts on contract. The same arguments are often getting used to downplay the role of GNU/Linux.

Database FUD is one thing, but in this particular case it comes from the very same firm that used to slam GNU/Linux and now come figures that contradict its own FUD. From the new article cited at the top:

But you can't blame any cooling of the open source phenomenon for the weak traction of open source databases. Open source on the operating system, for example, sees continued gains: Linux was the No. 3 relational database OS with 15.5 percent market share in 2006, when it grew by 67 percent over the previous year, Gartner found. (Stats for 2007 won't be ready for another few months.)

The following new comment speaks about how Gartner used to slam many things before they become too popular and widespread for their importance to be denied. That's when commoditisation threatened their clients. It puts it in good perspective the article above, to which it's referring.

Seriously, I don't trust anything coming out of ZDNet, Gartner, and a whole host of others. They've been dead wrong on a vast number of important things for YEARS now- at least a decade or more of it. Want junk advice- go looking to them for it.

Gartner's word should remain as credible as the hand that feeds it. Watch again the quote at the top of this post. The press should really become more cautious when quoting people in reference to matters where wealthy clients are secretly involved. Financially even. ⬆