By Rachel Chalmers
Microsoft Corp has devoted a web page to the controversy over a benchmark that claimed NT performed up to five times faster than Linux as a file server. Linux community leaders objected strenuously to the original tests, claiming they were slanted to favor NT (CI No 3,656). Mindcraft, the research company which performed the first benchmarks at Microsoft’s behest, has agreed to hold new tests. In order to address the concerns raised by the Linux community, Mindcraft promises: that top Linux folks will be allowed to configure and tune the Linux server; that representatives of both sides may be present at all tests; that the tests will be done at PC Week labs and be monitored and audited by PC Week; and that clients will run Windows NT workstation, which thanks to the Samba utility, Linux is able to support rather better than it can support Windows 9x.
Now Microsoft complains that the Linux community has been slow to respond to Mindcraft’s offer. It’s time for the Linux folks to step up to the challenge and prove that Linux is capable of achieving better results than Windows NT server, the new web page asserts. Although the Linux community is focusing on the messenger and not the message, Mindcraft has graciously agreed to rerun the tests at their own expense accommodating the Linux community. Microsoft appends a long list of benchmarks on which NT has outperformed Linux, or on which Linux has never been tested at all.
What could be behind the Linux community leaders’ strange reticence to respond to the challenge? Maybe they just have better things to do with their time. Though Linus Torvalds is frequently compared with or contrasted to Bill Gates, in fact he is far more like the technical leader on a large Microsoft project. But what he is most like is a hobbyist. While it makes sense for Microsoft to spend a lot of time and money tuning NT for benchmarking, since Microsoft is primarily a marketing organization and good benchmarks will help it sell its products, the Linux leaders Microsoft taunts – Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox and Jeremy Allison, among others – are not marketers. That means they don’t benefit in any particularly direct way when someone buys Linux.
In fact, their primary motivation for working on Linux, as all three have said on very many occasions, is to build an operating system that meets their own needs. Ensuring that the OS performs well in the highly artificial environment of a benchmark is not a particularly high priority for them. Far from being an admission of failure, it would be understandable if the Linux leaders never responded to Microsoft’s taunts at all.
