The interview is remarkable in that Boulder accepts every bit of Wein's replies without any further questions. It reminded me of the interviews one sees on shopping segments which are screened on Australian free to air television in the early hours of the morning.

If one goes by what Wein said, the software, despite being open source, cannot be toyed with to manipulate the data. She also claimed that no personal data was collected.

Apparently there are "checks and balances" within the software that prevent anybody from messing with the data. And while there is no way of identifying an individual's own data, there is also some mysterious way in which the software can determine whether someone is submitting the same data twice. Let me leave it at that. Boulder accepted all the marketing spiel at face value but then he sounded very much like a marketing person himself. (Pushing this kind of rubbish as a news item is an indication of of how seriously one should take a site like linux.com).

It brought a cynical smile to my face when Wein described Unisys and Microsoft as two of the big companies which are involved in open source. The times, they have indeed changed.

The fact is you have to register in order to be able to scan your machine. And while you are visiting the website to download the software and find out how to go about using it, I'm pretty sure that OpenLgic does not collect your IP address. No, really. I'm also pretty sure that when you register and obtain a census code - which you need in order to run the software, which is called ossdiscovery, on your PC - this code is not tied to any defining features of your PC. And, by the way, Santa Claus lives near the North Pole.

Such data is useful to an opponent of FOSS like Microsoft - the company can evaluate the extent of usage of open source packages against which it fancies it has patent claims. It can also get an idea of the use of open source software on Windows - something which it would love to encourage to the exclusion of the same software running on Linux. One thing is sure - Microsoft has no friendly feelings towards the open source community - the company has a business philosophy which is the direct opposite of open source.

Yet there exist plenty of deluded individuals who would like to think that they can co-opt the people at Redmond into the word of FOSS. What drives this kind of thinking is greed - there are open source outfits which salivate when they see the scale of the profits that Microsoft has made. They would like nothing better than to emulate the company.

For all its posturing, the so-called census has managed to attract just 292,296 installations. And this is a worldwide survey, or so OpenLogic would like to style it. Now that it is known that Microsoft is the main sponsor behind this data collection, it would be wiser for open source companies and individual users to avoid it like poison.

But a fundamental question remains: why are those who claim to be open source companies trying to live in the same moshpit as Microsoft? Has the Novell patent deal not convinced anyone of the intentions of those at Redmond?

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Linux  Microsoft  Open Source  Sam Varghese