This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: More censoring of benchmarks?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Ed Foster points out that MS - like many other vendors - is forbidding benchmarks as part of their standard contracts:
Is it possible Microsoft has something to hide about the performance of its server and developer products? It's hard to escape that conclusion when you see how many of its license agreements now contain language forbidding customers of those products from disclosing benchmark results.
The Cincom Smalltalk team is always happy to see customers run and publicize benchmarks, even when they don't look good. We don't pretend that we can run our software under all the types of use cases that our customers do; the only way we can improve is if we know where the problems are.
The MS clauses are worse than most; take a look at this:
Note that Microsoft's censorship clause doesn't just say you can't publish benchmarks " it says you can't disclose them at all, presumably to anyone, without written permission from Redmond. That leads to all sorts of interesting hypothetical questions. Suppose, for example, your boss asks you to run some performance tests on Exchange Server 2003 to see if your company should deploy it. Can you disclose the results to her without bringing Microsoft police knocking at your door?
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