Slashdot Mirror

For what it's worth, Linux counter estimates 18 million Linux users.

America has more linux users than any other country, almost double the next best country. Regardless of that fact, the idea that the 'rest of the world' is going to push the US into using linux is just pure provincial snobbery bordering on anti-Americanism. It's also a tremendous discredit to the pan-nationalist activism of Linux users, who don't play these petty turf wars.

According to the Linux Counter, Egypt has 2262 registered machines (with 156 registered users), or 2.26 users for every million people that live there. With a really low turnover, and half the people being actually getting linux installed, they could easily have enough people to quadruple the counter stats. Perhaps the organizers should invite people to Register.

With 3 more users, they could pass nepal.

According to the Linux Counter, Egypt has 2262 registered machines (with 156 registered users), or 2.26 users for every million people that live there. With a really low turnover, and half the people being actually getting linux installed, they could easily have enough people to quadruple the counter stats. Perhaps the organizers should invite people to Register.

With 3 more users, they could pass nepal.

Slackware is ahead of SUSE.

Thanks for the post. I see from the moderation more people appreciated your feedback then chose to directly respond.

As for the responses: people (Linux users) sometimes confuse being able to do something with being able to do something with some semblance of reasonability. Maybe we figure because we've been configuring you XFree setup by hand since 1998 that that sort of thing is even remotely acceptable. The truth is you *can* do just about everything on Linux (and more) that you can do on Windows, but it will involve a lot more reading and time and of course reading can be a pain in the ass and time is important to a lot of people.

Good job working with Linux (and reporting back) and here's hoping the next time you try it you find some of your issues have been taken care of. A sort of funny side note, I went and saw John 'Maddog' Hall speak a couple of years ago at our local LUG. He was using Suse on his laptop and seemed pleased at how simple to use it was. I guess even geeks get tired of fiddling with drivers and configuration files.

There's no doubt that we still have a long way to go (a lot of it is going to be pretty unglamourous work too). But if you've seen how far its come..wow. Thing keep getting better.

Dear People. You should know the following: 1. Iran is not an ARAB country. 2. The fact that who is the leader (mullah or not mullah), doesn't change anything. The computers will always live. 3. Internet will always find its ways to any country. 4. We don't hate the western people, rather they hate us. Example: IT is concidered prohibited by the American government the entry of powerfull encryption technology to Iran, and some other countries, which includes MD5. Therefore, we aren't allowed to d/l Linux (any reasonable distro) from US mirrors. 5. You know, there also exist some geeks, who don't care about politics at all. (Like me). 6. I am very intrested in OSS coming to Iran. It already has, to some extent. Check out: counter.li.org iranlinux.org and, kdefarsi.org . 7. Anyways, Linux and OSS will eventually take control of everywhere, including IRAN. 8. We are not TERRORISTS. We live like other people in the world. What is the point in being a terrorist anyways? How do you dare call us (including me) TERRORISTS? Have I killed you? Or what? 9. Religion has nothing to do with Open Source. Open Source is actually a special type of religion, if you put it that way. 10. May the source be with you. (NOET: Soorry for louzy spelling and grammar) --Regards, Darioush

You could get a feel for the number from

http://counter.li.org/reports/machines.php

Thats $700k per user, as per SCO. counter.li.org guesses there are 18 million Linux users, so the total value of the kernel is roughly $12,600,000,000,000. If Linus collected he could pay off the US national debt and live comfortably with $5 trillion left over!

Since real numbers are hard to come by, we get by on the very weak ones we have.
According to the version monitoring page at the Linux Counter, 35 out of the 4862 monitored machines run the 2.0 kernel - 0.7% of the total number of monitored machines.
If that holds true for the (who knows???) 20 million Linux machines out there in the wild, there should be something like 142000 2.0-kernel Linux boxes out there. Perhaps more - the "enthusiasts" who register with the Linux Counter may be more prone to upgrading than others....

Stand up and be counted! The Linux Counter wants you!

Since real numbers are hard to come by, we get by on the very weak ones we have.
According to the version monitoring page at the Linux Counter, 35 out of the 4862 monitored machines run the 2.0 kernel - 0.7% of the total number of monitored machines.
If that holds true for the (who knows???) 20 million Linux machines out there in the wild, there should be something like 142000 2.0-kernel Linux boxes out there. Perhaps more - the "enthusiasts" who register with the Linux Counter may be more prone to upgrading than others....

Stand up and be counted! The Linux Counter wants you!

They could find me: Registered Linux Owner #324965
Still waiting for my letter, Darl!

Actually, the *is* a "central body" collecting data on Linux installs right here. Its strictly voluntary and non-automated; you have to actively sign up if and when you find out about it. Hence, their numbers could reflect anything. BTW, this is Jon "Maddog" Hall's site; I remember when he first proposed the idea.

Follow the numbers at The Linux Counter!

this articles a good read so take the time to go through it as it summarises innovation from the early internet years to date.

innovation. The trick is finding that one crazy idea. The problem with crazy ideas, though, is that for every one good crazy idea, there's a thousand bad crazy ideas

the eternal quest for an idea. you better start with a good idea. if you don't, no matter how hard you try it wont pan out.

the Internet community back then, the key technical people, didn't want the Internet to become easy to use or graphical, ... Only smart people could use the Internet ...so we needed to keep it hard to use

what other examples can you think of right now?... only smart people can use [insert you own example]

Mosaic started with 12 users in February 1993. It had 1,000 users within three or four weeks. About 10,000 users by spring. It was up to 1 million by early 1994

Posters who question why Andreessen has such prominence should reflect on this. No Mosaic (mozilla), no Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE Based on NCSA Mosaic code base licensed from Spyglass), no World Wide Web in the early to mid 90's. No doubt someone else may have invented the browser but how much longer would it have taken?

At first that makes you like a little bunny rabbit ... Everybody wants to play with you ....within a year ... fearsome competitors shooting at your head with high-powered ammunition

Larry, Sergi do you feel the hot breath of the MS juggernaut as you approach your IPO. Will google will be a repeat of Netscape/MS tussle?

Oracle database was a huge success ... Larry's spent the last 25 years trying to come up with the next product

it sure helps when the government (CIA) is your preferred backer. Why does oracle feel the need to keep trying to re-innovate or create the next best idea?

innovation comes from companies that are 2 years old, populated by 19-year-olds ... preposterous that Marc should think that innovation is .. the province of little entrepreneurial companies.

In fact it's both. The technical revolution was spurred on the back of the transistor. This was the combined effort of Bardeen, Brattain and shockley at Bell Labs - no small comany there ... but look at Intel, though a big company now, it was started with the (not so young) Noyce, Moore and Grove. What about the Linux kernel, third person shooters and that other search engine, Yahoo?

According to Linux counter it is number 4. Considering number of distributions out there it *is* a major distro.

• 0.8% using 2.0
• 8.9% running 2.2
• 86.5% running 2.4
• 3.5% running 2.6.

(Statistics based on 4503 machines that choose to send in updates. The method is obviously biased.You have been warned.)

I think we will see a lot more adoption abroad.

I assume you mean abroad as in not US. The comparison under is not quite fair, favors small countries and is in no way accurate, but who cares... My point is, Linux is widely adopted outside the US.

From counter.li.org:

USA: 94.90 users/million
Some states:
New York: 78.35 users/million
Texas: 90.95 users/million
California: 101.52 users/million
Arizona: 111.53 users/million
Maryland: 117.78 users/million
Pensylvania: 166.60 users/million

Some other countries:
Germany: 135.25 users/million
Spain: 144.31 users/million
Poland: 183.89 users/million
Holand: 215.54 users/million
Norway: 445.37 users/million
Estonia: 511.26 users/million
Finland: 610.85 users/million

My teacher was right, statistics can be fun, in a dry, inacurate sort of way... :)

... but I, being a karma whore, will spell it out for you: The LiCo asssigns a unique ID to a registrated user. The registration, however, is only counted in the statistics if the user has logged in during the past year. Hence, to keep being counted, you have to periodically revalidate your registration by logging in or by using a script. This is to weed out inactive users who didn't bother to unregister at LiCo.

Try Linux International's Linux Counter.

Linux could not have used any Minix code as even the earliest version of Linux was GPLd
The first release of Linux had a licence that permited everything except making money on Linux. That was quicly (0.12, december 1991) changed to GPL. See for example here. Version 0.12 got GPL.

http://counter.li.org/

"linux usage" is hard to gauge. there's no central licensing authority (despite a certain moronic company's attempt). of course that argument is rather silly as closed software companies have to guess at their user base. for instance i count as 2 solaris users and around 10 windows users if you go by licenses purchased but i don't use either of those os's.

Or you could go to the linux counter, and see that SuSE is behind Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake and Slackware.

I know, lies, damn lies, statistics and all that, but let's face it, when people think of Linux, SuSE doesn't exactly spring to mind.

I am going to avoid ad-hominem attacks and just present facts - can you do the same?

3 years? I calc 2 1/2 years - amazing how 3 years is a lot to you but not 6 months.

Let's look at some of your other arguments:

You say that Linux was just a fledgling in 2001 and yet RedHat reported profits for the first time in 2001 and Linux had over 15,000,000 users already in 1999 (source - RedHat. The only estimate I could find of users today is around 18,000,000. Obviously we are not talking about servers here but I am making the argument that Linux was far from fledgling at that point.

You compared the change to the "Microsuck revolution." What revolution would that be? Dos far outsold anything that Apple ever put out and Windows 3.1 had sold 10 million in 1990 (the most of any GUI at that point). By the mid 90's Apple was struggling just to survive. That's why they hired Gil Amelio in 96 to clean house. I remember those days because at that point I was fresh out of college and using a Mac - an SE/30 that probably still runs today. At that point the entire population of computers was small enough to make any change a significant percentage. Nowaday's - well let's save that for next.

The change that would be needed to get the swing you are talking about is astronomical. You are saying that Linux went from a 28% share to a 65% share. Now we don't have an accurate count of actual servers (at least not that I saw) but let's use 10 million since it is round and underestimated. If Linux was at 28% and went to 65%, assuming that the total count stayed the same there would have to have been 3.7 Million new Linux servers brought online. And that is way lowball. You are basically saying that Linux on the server has grown 130% in 2 1/2 years while Microsoft has shrunk in half. Considering that we established earlier that the entire population of Linux users is estimate to have grown by 3 million since 1999 I think that is a little ambitious.

Now one thing I noticed is that you ignored my comment about the change in the regular survey in that timeframe. In that time the percentage of Apache sites grew from 63 to 65 and IIS grew from 20 to 24. If there was such a huge swing away from Microsoft then how do you explain the growth in IIS? IIS doesn't run on Linux or any other OS.

And how about some logic. If I am a webhost running thousands of sites who am I a going to choose? Linux of course. It is faster, cheaper, more stable, easier to configure, and more secure. BUT if I am a big business that is only going to host two or three sites and I am already paying Microsoft for the servers what would I choose? Well even then I might choose Linux but most of them would choose Windows.

You talk about security being a big switching factor and yet most of the worms have been hitting desktops. Nimda and Code Red were IIS specific but they only lasted as long as they did because of amateurs not patching their machine. Big companies just patched and moved. And patching does not mean your site being down for hours. Most large sites have more than one webserver. That alone is enough for me to question your expertise. And like I said - the numbers from just last month don't support that assumption. IIS is still growing.

You want to know how really is getting hurt the most by Linux? Sun. The switch from Solaris to Linux is MUCH easier and cheaper than switching from Windows to Linux. So if Linux did grow from its 28% (which I'm sure it did to some extent) then it would be taking a lot of it from Sun and the other unix flavors.

Your comment about Microsoft on Netcraft is confusing. All I saw was a lot of IIS6. Maybe I am missing something. A link would be nice.

I am sure I could go on but this is the last of my posts until I see:

Solid numbers to support your case (I have given you tons - old and new).
Links - You seem to have lots of info but no support.
Rational discussion - name calling is tiresome and AC comment bashing is usually the last line of defense for a losing argument.

I look forward to your FULL response.

Marijuana legalization is an extremely relevant issue. Do you have any idea how many public resources are devoted to investigating, trying, and imprisoning innocent people? They have made us of a wholesome substance into a crime that you can be sent to prison for a long time for. This is a huge injustice that far more important to address than large power bills or the RIAA sueing a couple college students.

The War on Drug Users has only lasted as long as it has because of a massive FUD campaign from industry and government. This is not a small issue. There are as many or more marijuana smokers than linux users. Marijuana was originally prohibited because hemp competed with the paper industry. How would you feel if free software was made illegal because it cut into the profits of software companies? We linuxers have been lucky so far, we pot smokers haven't.

I think georgy is expecting that by being honest with people from the start and unafraid to stand up for what she believes in that she will win the respect of the people and provide a real alternative to the current political old boy system. The worst thing for Georgys campaign is for her to come off as just another politician pandering for votes. If Georgy were to run in my state I would seriously consider registering to vote, even though I find voting fundamentally unethical

High time to disclose personal info in your Linux Counter entry! Let them know you care!

Come on, guys. I'm waiting...

I'm proudly registered at the Linux Counter with number #150681, and I'm going show it off on my homepage.

Come on! Stop bashing SCO, and try to understand what is it exactly that they are talking about...

They say that there are MILLIONS (with an S) of infringing lines of code.

Moreover, they claim that the GPL is void and that copyright law only allows for one copy only.

Knowing that there may be around 18 millions linux users, it is obvious that they are talking about ONE line of highly essential code replicated millions of times in healthy computers (i.e. running linux) around the globe.

Now stop bashing SCO, will you, or I'll mod you down, all of you!

Let's put in $20 for each Linux we have, then:

• buy SCO
• license all their IP/code to GNU
• and if we are in a real evil mood: dissolve the company.

Perhaps it's time for the world to meet Open Capitalism

First, as stated before elsewhere, Linus is not the sole owner of the trademark. There are a couple of hundred of developers who co-own the mark.

Linus has outlined the general policy for the trademark use here a long time ago. Today I believe Linux International manges all Linux trademark related issues and mantain a trademark fund to help finnance Linux development.

I think every major distro has entered an agreement with Linus\Linux International about the use of the "Linux" trademark in conjunction with their "service" trademarks or "combination" trademarks.

According
Linux Counter Machine Report, the distributions
of choice on Linux machines is as follows:

Red Hat 28.60%

Debian 19.36%

Mandrake 16.37%

Slackware 11.37%

SuSE 11.35%

Others 9.80%

Gentoo 2.02%

Conectiva 1.29%

Do-it-yourself 1.24%

Naturally, these statistics may or may not accurately represent the real world. (Btw. if you add up those percentages you get 101.4%)

How do you check your Linux Counter stats?

If you don't remember your login information, you can fill in the email address you registered using at the bottom of this page to have your information sent to you. That works if you still have use of the same email address you used when you signed up. If not, you can request them look it up manually.

How do you check your Linux Counter stats?

If you don't remember your login information, you can fill in the email address you registered using at the bottom of this page to have your information sent to you. That works if you still have use of the same email address you used when you signed up. If not, you can request them look it up manually.

... when Slackware was released

So do I, though I was using the MCC distribution from the U. of Manchester. I never did get around to trying Slackware.

I had forgotten about this until recently, it's been so long. I was even reminded of The Linux Counter, where I had apparently registered as user #69.

I tried to find other more general stats like say the market share of Linux and so on. They are very hard to find for various reasons. But here is one that's as good as any (especially since we win!): Linux vs Microsoft.

If any patents could be issued on any part of Minix (not possible anymore, I believe, because it has already been published), then this would mean bad times for Linux under the proposed new EU patent legislation.

The SCO Group (SCOX) has 12.2 million shares outstanding at $10.77 per share, for a market capitalization of $131.3M. I think some have assumed IBM would buy them out to remove the litigation risk, but why not someone else? For $66M or so you could control the company. That's only $3.65 for each estimated Linux user.

Pick up a copy of _Just_For_Fun_ by Linus Torvalds, or read this. The license he chose reminds me a lot of the dikumud license. It is more restrictive in that it does not allow Linux to be sold by anyone. Linus was initially not so sure about the GPL, but he decided in the end to go with it. The rest, as tey say, is history.

How about at The Linux Counter project?

Estonia has two mobile operators offering quite cheap GPRS (and cheap WiFi + GPRS deals)

Eesti Telefon has >36 000 ADSL subscribers. Last I checked ET had ~1 Gbps out of country bandwidth. 256/128 US$33, 512/256 US$44, 640/320 US$59, 1000/512 US$112, 2000/640 US$185, 8000/764 US$354. All these packages have no bandwidth or port limits and starting from the 640/320 one static IP is provided and with higher ones more can be rented.

Also offering ADSL is Uninet

Cable service by Starman, ~10 000 Internet service subscribers IIRC.

Plus tons of leased line and WiFi service providers.

100/1000 Mbps Tallinn Internet Exchange peering point, aka TIX

Established IPv6. Lots of non-profit CAT5 and some fibre neighborhood/cityblock wide installations. Extensively used Linux and other non-evil OS-es ;)

And all that in ~1.4M population. Don't be shy now, come and see what we have to offer, maybe you'll learn something ;)

$22 million for Corel? Hell. It's time for the open-source community to start considering buyouts. That's about US $1.22 per user, according to one estimate. Not a high price to pay for the WP and Corel Draw source.

A week or two ago I checked out linuxcounter and I swear there was an entry for north korea (1 user). Now there is nothing. Strange...

--Where did you get those numbers for XP? Oh that's right, you pulled them out of your ass.

Google Zeitgeist says 31% XP, 21% W2K, 4% NT, 3% Mac, 1% Linux. There are a bunch of other sources like IDC, market research companies, your or your friends' company if you/they're working for a huge company especially doing/selling cross-platform products/services.

I encourage you do your own research and share with us.

--You SERIOUSLY underestimate the number of Linux users out there. And you have nothing to back up your claims.

IDC says Linux may surpass Mac OS in 2005. Today there are less than 30 million Mac user and the Mac share is at least 3 times bigger than the Linux one.

Is my 10- million Linux user a SERIOUS underestimate as you claim? I doubt, you didn't write any smart or valuable information.

Go away, troll.

== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??

I mean Linux did exist before IBM...

Linux existed before IBM?

Check your facts, dude. Didn't Linus create Linux somewhere around 1991?

Check here for more info.

By registering on Linux counter?

I mean, really.

What are the primary means of assessing Linux on the Desktop usage statistics, and how reliable are these methods? Also, what types of methods are used to offset each method's failings?

There are websites that track such statistics. In your opinion, how reliable are these sites in general?

Since this is about statistics, I thought I'd add some more.... from http://counter.li.org/
Interesting pieces:
- Of Linux users, 47% use it at work; a whooping 90% use it at home.
Lesson: All the developers use it at home, too.
- 99.5%!!! of Linux boxes have Ethernet. This is likely to mean that just about all the home Linux boxes are in multi-machine homes (or DSL).
- Red Hat leads the pack, but has only 30% of the market - there are 5 other distributions above the 10% mark
- All statistics are biased.

The Linux Counter count has gone down by 7.000 (from 140.000 to 133.000) since Jan 1, 2003 - this is mostly Slashdot users who registered in November 2001, and whose emails have gone bad since then. You're welcome back!

Log in and check if you're registered!

To help debunk the number of MS vs. Linux users:

Maybe if more people registered With Linux Counter we could have a more accurate count of the number of Linux users.

From the Linux Counter:

Kernel Count Percentage

2.0 34 1.0%
2.2 549 15.6%
2.4 2927 82.9%
2.5 16 0.5%
Others 0.1%


No, it's not dead yet.

(and on boxes out there running other versions, and on uptimes, etc.) - see the Linux Counter