REDMOND — Microsoft's war on Linux isn't about to let up.

The Redmond software vendor plans to step up its "Get the Facts" anti-open-source campaign in the coming year by adding more evidence, in the form of customer case studies and analyst reports, to its arsenal.

That's what Kevin Johnson, Microsoft's group vice president of worldwide sales, marketing and services, told the approximately 300 press and analysts attending Microsoft's annual financial analyst meeting here on Thursday.

Johnson spent almost all of his 30-minute address focusing on a question many Wall Street analysts have pondered repeatedly: How will Microsoft continue to gain market and mind share against its many open-source competitors?

Johnson used market-research data from third-party firms, as well as from the company's own researchers, to show that Windows is maintaining - and growing - its market share vis-à-vis Linux. He said that the data shows that on the server, Windows and Linux are grabbing market share from Unix and Novell NetWare, rather than from each other. And, citing Gartner Group numbers, Johnson said Windows maintained its 96 percent PC desktop market share, compared to Linux with 1.4 percent and the Mac OS with 2.2 percent.

Johnson said Microsoft has a good story to tell when selling against open source on a variety of fronts, including TCO (total cost of ownership), interoperability, security, developer productivity and customer indemnification.

"There's perceived TCO (advantage) on Linux, but that perception is not reality," Johnson claimed.

Johnson cited the collection of 16 third-party analyses conducted over the past year that Microsoft is touting on its "Get the Facts" Web site as evidence upon which customers are relying in evaluating Linux vs. Windows. He said Microsoft has documented the experiences of 75 customers who have either evaluated or used Linux who have opted for Windows instead. In total, Microsoft has a "pipeline" of 200 or more referenceable customers who are willing to talk about their Windows vs. Linux evaluation experiences.

Microsoft's Get the Facts campaign hasn't been without controversy, however. A number of industry watchers have noted that Microsoft has sponsored the majority of these studies, thus bringing into question the objectivity of this research. (Johnson specifically noted that of the 16 studies conducted over the past year, the last five were not sponsored by Microsoft.)

And just this week at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, one keynoter said that vendor lock-in is more of a customer decision maker/breaker in Windows vs. Linux evaluations than is TCO.

In related news, Microsoft announced Thursday that its experiment in releasing some of its products under an open-source license is attracting a substantial amount of interest.

Earlier this year, Microsoft released its source code for its Windows Installer and Windows Template Library products on SourceForge under the Common Public License, a bona fide open-source license. The parent company of SourceForge, the Open Source Technology Group, said that these two Microsoft "projects" are among the top five percent, in terms of developer interest and "activity," among all projects hosted by SourceForge.