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Market Share Reports On Linux
spizkapa writes: "IDC has predicted that Linux will grow steadily along with Microsoft in the near future in the home PC (client) market, as well as including numbers that prove Linux's acceptance rate is fantastic. " The numbers look nice, especially in the server area, but it's too bad that things weren't broken down more. I'm also wondering where *BSD fits in -- I assume under UNIX, but it's unfortunate that they weren't broken out separately.
I'll be damned if I'm going to run linux until I _know_ that there are at least 4.5 million boxes running it.
Netcraft says that there are over 10 million servers running Apache on the publicly accessable internet. Those are machines that are running basically 24/7, not 'dual boot' machines or people's dialup boxes that are getting miscounted. Netcraft also says that over 1/3 of the Apache servers are running Linux as their OS. According to the Linux counter, less than 30% of Linux boxes are used as web servers.
Given those numbers, how could anyone reasonably believe that there aren't well more than 4.5 million Linux boxes running out there?
And yes, I am probably just feeding the trolls...
They're couting shipments of Linux, which totally misses out on all of the downloads.
I've set up a good 30 linux boxes in my time, and I've never purchased a single copy.
Once again, Linux doesn't fit into the normal boxes used to judge these things. The distribution model for it is entirely unheard of, and so they don't have any mechanisms for couting this massively popular means of obtaining linux.
Also, shipments of an operating system that can be installed a theoretically infinite number of times are obviously skewed when compared to OSs like NT, which are to be installed on a single server.
Interesting article, but there's some comparisons going on here that aren't quite as clear-cut as they seem at first glance.
Figure 1 - Worldwide, 1999 Client and Server Operating Environment Revenues by Platform ($B)
Well, DUH! Ain't much revenue for an "Operating Environment" that can be downloaded for free, so no wonder Linux lags behind 32-bit windows.
Figure 2- Worldwide Client Operating Environment New License Shipment Shares 1999 and Shipment Growth 1999-2004
Now that's better, as they are now comparing the number of Licenses instead of Dollars, but what do they define as a "client"? Does a TiVObox running Linux count? What about an IBM watch? Besides, I can just as well install the server version of Linux (or NT, for that matter) on my home PC.
Figure 3 - Worldwide Server Operating Environment New License Shipment Shares 1999 and Shipment Growth 1999-2004
Again, how do they define and differentiate between servers? I'd be willing to bet that a license for Solaris on a big Sun box is not really on the same par as a 486DX66 running a Linux server, but it seems that a license is a license is a license according to these stats.