Until recently, if you wanted to find someone who thought that a Windows-based program was cheaper than one based on Linux, you had to go all the way to Redmond. No more. Not since Microsoft paid Forrester Research’s Giga Research to conduct a comparative study of the costs of developing a Web-based portal. The study compared the costs incurred by five large and midsize companies that used the Java 2 Enterprise Edition with costs incurred by seven large and midsize companies that used .Net applications. For large corporations in the study, the cost of using Microsoft products for development and deployment plus three years of maintenance was 28 percent less than the cost for J2EE/Linux. And for midsize companies, the Microsoft route was 25 percent cheaper. Of course, it’s not shocking that a study commissioned by Microsoft should demonstrate the advantages of that company’s products over Linux, but the fact that the study was commissioned at all reveals Microsoft’s concern. And for good reason. IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher) recently reported that sales of Linux servers are growing faster than those of Windows servers, and Gartner tells us that the sales of servers running Linux are up nearly 60 percent from a year earlier. In short, it’s a very good time for Bill Gates to pull out his checkbook and order up some market research.

Forrester analysts John Rymer and Bob Cormier explain that the study intended, among other things, to inject some rational thought into the emotional debate between Linux-leaning ideologues and the rest of the world. In fact, the most interesting aspect of the report is that it demonstrates the ideological battle over Linux is moot. Like those "rebellious" presidential candidates who admit that they inhaled, Linux is now a major part of the establishment. Take a look: The Giga Research study found that the biggest cost advantages of Microsoft products came in comparison to the cost of Linux-based products sold by monster software makers Oracle and BEA. According to the study, large corporations paid $80,000 for Oracle’s database, compared with less than $40,000 for Microsoft SQL; and they paid $60,000 to BEA for development tools, compared with $12,500 to Microsoft Visual Studio .Net. Midsize companies, the study found, enjoyed savings of similar proportions.

What would the cost savings look like if the companies that paid big bucks to Oracle and BEA had used free Linux-based databases and scripting tools such as PHP and MySQL? Giga doesn’t know because, as Cormier explains, it didn’t look at any such companies. He says that Giga—not Microsoft—decided which companies to look at.