Red Hat's Linux Market Share Eroding?

chamont writes: "Even though Red Hat is still number 1, this article states that Caldera, SuSE, and Turbo are gaining ground fast. The article also mentions that Corel is pretty much history." Interesting to see -- what's cool is that the Linux market, at least what they measured, grew 89% overall. Turbolinux had monstrous growth overall -- you can see a lot more is happening on Pacific Rim.

Comments

Horribly inaccurate

[jailbrekr2]

And *where* is LinuxOne listed? Oops. Time for my medication now.....

Re:not a good measurement?

[molog]

There was no sales decline. Sales of Redhat were up by 69% but total Linux growth was 89% or something like that. Redhat didn't grow as much as the other distros.
Molog

So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

What happens if someone wins the race

[n-baxley]

What will happen if one Linux distrubutor becomes so dominate as to knock the others out of business? Do they become the new MS? Sure geeks will get it from anywhere they want, but what will regular users see on the shelves? Let's say that RH does become overly dominant. They can esentially control what version will get rolled out to the public, and what gets included in that distro. Is this a scenario to be concerned about?

nate

Re:Redhat 2 was better than slackware and yggdrasi

[Inoshiro]

I have a Linux Developer's Resource CD-ROM in my hand. It has Slackware 2.3 with ELF beta. It also has Red Hat Mother's Day release +0.1. It's dated August 1995, and also has things like tsx-11.mit.edu, sunsite.unc.edu, Kernels 1.2.13 and 1.3.15, XFree86 3.1.2, Japanese Linux stuff, and Doom :-)

From this, one could assume that Slackware was further ahead of RH on the great "ELF changeover," as RH seems to have been pre-1.0 back then. Any other Linux History majors care to clear this up?
--

Re:I miss my yggdrasil!

[slam smith]

Looking at their web site sure is wierd. It's like time stopped 4 years ago.

the *nix question

[hawk]

>Unix (and Unix-like)

these would be "*nix"

So far, so good. But how is *nix pronounced?

a) Unix
b) splat-nix
c) Unix-like operating system
d) FreeBSD-like operating system

I choose d), though no doubt it would be more popular to go to e), Linux like operating system . . .

hawk, who really should be making slides . . .

Re:the *nix question

[Ptolemarch]

Indeed. I chose d, and subsequently typed it as I'd pronounce it. :-)

Thank you very much

[toofast]

After reading the /. headline and the article, I couldn't help but feel bad for Corel, who are giving Linux their all. I use Corel Linux at work, where SMB/MS connectivity is a must. Corel performs well on the PII-350 64M, and I access all of my SMB shares through point-and-click interfaces. This is what I need at work to be productive. (home == slackware)

But after seeing your stats, I realized that the articles were misinformed and were only spreading FUD in my mind. I bought Corel Linux SE and I like it.

Re:Market share by type

[David Ham]

Mandrake is based very heavily on RedHat. At first, Mandrake was just a repackaging of RedHat. Abit's Gentus is also a repackaging of RedHat. So is LinuxOne *shudders*. Storm Linux and Corel are repackagings of Debian. I'd say that if it's a repackaging of a distribution, it belongs to the family. Or if it borrows heavily, such as Mandrake does now.

--
you must amputate to email me

Re:not a good measurement?

[evil_one]

The methodology used is great if you're trying to figure out who's making how much money from selling Linux distributions, but isn't so great if you're trying to figure out which distributions are good ones, or popular ones.

This wasn't a review of what distros are good - we've had many flame wars over that - It is about sales. It is sales of bundles that keep these companies alive (O.k., we have some like Debian that are volunteer) and generating the software. The point of this is not "Oh! Redhat is starting to suck" it's "Uh oh... Redhat, the company that is funding this, this and that is starting to suffer a sales decline"
That's all.

---

Re:Corel = Cut out bins

[MatriXOracle]

Hmm I dunno, maybe because it's the old verion? They did release the Second Edition of Corel OS only about a month ago...

Re:How'd they get on top?

[jargoone]

Two weeks ago I "installed" a 1"x1" Debian "swirl" sticker, and my hard drive is 14% faster, CPU is 23% faster, and RAM increased by a factor of 1.5.

shit. now we have computer riceboys, too. just what we need.

Moderate this up...

[deepone]

Duh...

History Major

[maynard]

The Yggdrasil disk was from mid '94, the Redhat install must have taken place after your Slackware 2.3 release. I've never installed Slackware, but not out of bias against the dist. It's clear that I'm mistaken WRT which distributions were prepared for ELF support first. However, I certainly have had this installation running since RH-2.x, and before that I ran an Yggdrasil dist.

Re:History Major

[Tet]

Ok, this is a short guide for those people who actually want to get a running system, not just look at the pretty source code :-). You'll certainly need minix for most of the steps.

Hmmm. I guess that must have been out of date even then, because I certainly didn't need Minix when I installed Linux. IIRC, my first install was done with a boot/root disk from Linus (0.12?), but it wasn't really useful enough to do anything other than play around with. The first full Linux install I did was the MCC distribution, which I got on 4 high-density 5.25" floppies. I didn't have enough hard drive space for the "huge" SLS distribution at the time (it was 65MB, I think). No trace of Minix anywhere...

Mirror.

[Tairan]

I got so disgusted with the having to register, and the slower response, and all the other crap, I just decided to throw up a mirror. How like me. If anyone is interested, the ad-less, faster, clean version is over at http://johncglass.com/mirror/distwars . htm

Re:How'd they get on top?

[Cephas Keken]

ummm your .sig disagrees with your post or is that the other way around

Market Share

[jjr]

Redhat grow slowly but stil has a good Market Share in the US. This also leaves room for competion. Which is a good thing if one company controls the market then that company that can lean to abuse (Microsoft) I am glad to see this study out. It show linux is heading the right direction.

Red Hat had the best installer for a long time.

[Anonymous Coward]

It was very easy for Linux newbies to use. Just some minimal questions and 20 minutes later you had a working Linux box. Yast presented a bazillion options to confuse the new user. Debian's dselect STILL SUCKS today. Slackware, the free CD in every Linux book, cane with no docs or help. So Red Hat gained popularity.

And the red hat "control-panel" made simple administrative setup and configuration easy for the newbie Linux user migrating over from windos.

Momentum

[kevlar]

No offense, but I believe that the majority of the Linux market is due solely to "momentum" and people who are investing in "cool shit" rather than profit margins.

I miss my yggdrasil!

[linzeal]

yggdrasil was the first linux distro I ever tried whatever happened to them ?

Re:I miss my yggdrasil!

[linzeal]

I'm going to call up some of the #'s on their web site and see if I can get an answer :)

Re:Market share by type

[bbcat]

Whether Debian is good or not is irrelevant. This
doesn't change the fact that Corel is a flop
because of their choice of Debian instead of
Slackware or RedHat. I had to recompile code
to get it to work on Corel while I didn't have
to do that to go from Slackware, RedHat, SuSE
Caldera or Mandrake.
Corel chose Debian so you couldn't easily
just use pieces of their distribution with
SuSE, RedHat or other distributions.
This is not to say that Corel Linux isn't
good (assuming that you ignore the installation
program blowing partition tables) but that they
chose to act like Microsoft which is to try to
take over the market. In Linux you either join
the crowd or hit a brick wall.

Re:How'd they get on top?

[dboyles]

Obviously it's because they have a cool logo. Any Linux newbie has to be attracted the that cool guy in the hat. After one has used Red Hat for awhile, [s]he realizes that it's considered the "newbie distro." That's when they move on to a truly one-three-three-seven (as the kids say) distro like Debian.

The Debian logo is only slightly trailing the Red Hat logo in one-three-three-seven-ness. Two weeks ago I "installed" a 1"x1" Debian "swirl" sticker, and my hard drive is 14% faster, CPU is 23% faster, and RAM increased by a factor of 1.5.

I also have a five year install.

[toppk]

I started with caldera 1.0 eval (in '95-'96)... which was built on top of redhat 3.x (I think). I was really tired of reformats for each upgrade of slackware.. But I didn't trust redhat (It took 10 months of no SLS releases for me to trust slackware ;). Here are some tips:

1) Get check-packages from rawhide. It's really simple.. A cron job that does 'rpm -Va' and 'rpm -qa'... nightly and sends you diffs... start getting rid of programs that's install are screwed.

2)Now, go into /bin and run "rpm -qf * > /dev/null". The list that returns are proggies that aren't in the rpm db. Do you need them.

I was going nuts since I've arrived on rh6.2. But after going to rh7.0beta and a couple weeks of the above, my distro is pretty stock. But better... I keep some .rpm's from my caldera desktop..

But this is the main point of why I chose redhat. Who the fsck cares about installs... You only do one of them for the life of a computer (and in my case this install survived two computers and three hardrives). I like an aggressive distro, using the latest and greatest, and not too many issues. Put it simple, take PAM. I like and use pam, and redhat wrote it for linux. All the other punk distro's were _so_ behind on this awesome part of linux...

Illustrative Example

[Spud Zeppelin]

This is a beautifully illustrative example of why it pays to observe important caveats, like: Don't trust a statistic that's published without its methodology. Good science is grounded on being reproducible -- the core of which is telling you how they did it. Simply saying "Based on the latest figures from IDC" doesn't tell you what the collection methodology was, or allow you to judge whether that methodology was or was not accurate.

Of course, those of us in the community can look around us and see that their numbers were wrong -- which makes this problem even worse: the site it came from is targeted to the "manage by magazine" crowd, which makes their complete omission of Slackware and Debian, and their gross underestimation of Mandrake's US installations, substantially more dangerous, since they are misinforming already grossly-underinformed decision makers.

MOO;IANAL.

Re:So where's Debian?

[AntEater]

Over the past few years, I either install Debian over the net or from a CD set purchased from cheap-bytes. I install onto 20+ machines at a time per upgrade and I'd be surprised if my aquisition methods were counted in this survey.

From personal experience, if RH is seeing a decline it is because their "support" is not a good value. I know I've made my last purchase from them

Redhat - stick in the mud

[DrXym]

I've used Redhat since 5.1 and I've become increasingly disllusioned with its progress with each release. While each point release has meant a few package upgrades, the inclusion of some important new software (e.g. 2.2 kernel, Gnome & KDE etc.), the fundamental operating system has hardly changed at all.

In particular, Redhat Linux is hardly more usable (to a casual user) than it ever was. There has been no substantial steps made to making the thing more user-friendly. A cobbled-together "solution" of Gnome or KDE, linuxconf and a few other disparate tools is not user-friendly.

Secondly, Redhat is still too happy to install a load of unwanted shit onto your harddrive as part of a default install. Most people simply do not need mail, news, ftp, http servers installed and running by default. What the hell are they thinking to leave these things enabled? Not only does this leave the box with gaping wide ports, but it degrades the overall machine performance. If anyone really needs them then they should have to turn them on themselves.

How'd they get on top?

[Levine]

It's kind of hard for me to figure out how RedHat got on top so quickly (and stayed there, it seems). Is it simply because they were the 'first' to offer Linux in a box with a tech support number? It just seems like there are so many better options, and RedHat doesn't stand out as a clear winner in any category.

-levine

Re:How'd they get on top?

[Erataikasu]

Yes. It's because they were first.

In marketing, the absolute best thing you can do is be first. Everything else you can do is compensating for not being first. If you can't be first in an existing category, invent a new category you can be first in.

Occasionally 'better' beats out 'first', but it's the exception.

Re:How'd they get on top?

[alfredo]

It's the logo. I use YellowDog Linux because I am a mailman who also likes dogs. Waiting for YDL2.

Re:How'd they get on top?

[linuxgod]

To my knoledge Alan Cox uses RedHat also.

Re:How'd they get on top?

[tshak]

My philosphy is as follows:

Build a system that is more usable, and the user will more efficiently innovate. (+.sig)

There is a difference between "dumbing down" a product, and making a product more usable. A product that a fool can use has all functionality striped out, and is so dumbed down that it takes 3 times longer to accomplish a simple task (thanks to "wizards" and the like).

Re:How'd they get on top?

[aanantha]

Redhat's been around for a long time, though. That might have a lot to do with it. Caldera and Turbolinux are fairly new. And Mandrake is an offshoot from Redhat 5.2. I believe Slackware was the first. I don't remember there being any noticeable competitors for several years. Slackware didn't have the concept of a package management system, and there wasn't really any polish to it. For an experienced UNIX user, it was good enough. And Linux users back then pretty much had all prior experience with UNIX.

The fact that Slackware even provided precompiled software was itself a pretty sweet thing. SunOS gave us squat. Redhat came in later with basically 2 contributions. Redhat introduced the first popular package management system, RPM. And they created all these GUI configuration tools. Perhaps it was RPM that made Redhat successful. Now you could install 3rd party software for Linux without having to compile it. That must have been very attractive to Linux newbies or to people like me who are generally too lazy to compile stuff.

That and a lot of marketing probably made Redhat what it is today. And since then Redhat has built up hardware alliances with VA Linux and Dell. And companies tend to feel more comfortable with an operating system from a known established provider. Redhat's an American company and so they've put more work into marketing here. Suse has been around for a long time in Europe, and they directed their marketing efforts there. The same with TurboLinux in the Pacific Rim. So 3 of the top Linux distributers have distinct geographic strongholds.

And as you said, Redhat isn't really a clear winner in any category. They're slow to provide security fixes and slow to update kernels and other software. But when they gained that marketshare, it was pretty much the opposite. But now after having grown so much, they've gotten sluggish.

Re:How'd they get on top?

[sbryant]

I believe Slackware was the first.

Slackware was (I think) second. Certainly, SLS was around before Slackware. I was using it too - with a 0.99pl7 kernel!! Slackware was more complete than SLS, but both were very primitive compared to today's distributions. You had to configure pretty much everything by hand (X was no joke).

These days I use SuSE. I just upgraded to version 7 (the "professional" one), which comes complete with kitchen sink and caffiene-utils. Actually, having everything on one DVD is useful. (You get the 6 CDs too with the same stuff on them.)

-- Steve

Re:How'd they get on top?

[Stephan Schulz]

Very likely they were the first ones to offer Linux in a box via normal retail channels at all. SLS and Slackware were there before Red Hat, but not available in any store at that time.

Red Hat also is a very good distribution. They have a fairly good packaging system (and brought it to the market first) and they offer distributions not only for Intel, but also for SPARC and Alpha.

Finally, Linus used to use Red hat early on (probably because of the Alpha support), which very likely gave them a boost in popularity.

Over here in Germany, SuSE was the first distribution widely available in shops, and while I have no hard data, it certainly is the dominant player here.

Re:How'd they get on top?

[acacia]

My first copy was borrowed, and I didn't need tech support. From my perspective, Red Hat's RPM was a big selling point. Back when I started working with Linux ('97) I really liked the package manager, even though it kinda sucked at first. Now it is just a matter of "ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality...

I can get whatever I want from the web at monster speeds, so the distro doesn't matter to me anymore, but I still buy every other release from RedHat because supporting them means supporting the community. My attitude is by all means chose whomever you want, but support at least one distro.

Re:How'd they get on top?

[tshak]

It seems to me that whenever a company goes public, starts making money, or makes things easier for the user, /. reacts against it. I personally like Redhat - and I don't care if they are the biggest - I just like the distribution! Now, I've heard good things about Mandrake, so I plan on setting up a box to try it out soon. The point is, use the distribution that works for you, and remember, there's nothing wrong with:

- Making money
- Making product more usable
- A Company that goes "public"

Distributions - heh

[mackga]

I always get a kick out the distro list on LWN:
Distributions
Alphanet
Alzza Linux
Bad Penguin Linux
Best Linux
Black Cat Linux
BluePoint Linux
CAEN Linux
Cafe Linux
Caldera OpenLinux
Circle MUDLinux
Complete Linux
Conectiva Linux
Corel Linux
Debian GNU/Linux
deepLinux
Definite Linux
DLite
e-smith
Elfstone Linux
Eridani
ESware Linux
Eurielec Linux
eXecutive Linux
FTOSX
Gentoo
Gentus
Gibraltar
HA Linux
Halloween Linux
HispaFuentes
IceLinux
Ivrix
ix86 Linux
Jurix
Kaiwal Linux
Kondara MNU/Linux
KRUD
KSI-Linux
Laonux
LASER5
Leetnux
Linpus Linux
Linux Cyrillic Edition
Linux MLD
Linux-Mandrake
LinuxFromScratch
LinuxOne OS
LinuxPPP
Linux Pro Plus
Linux-SIS
LNX System
LoopLinux
LSD
Lunar Penguin
Lute Linux
MageNet
Mastodon
MaxOS
minilinux
nmrcOS
NoMad Linux
Nuclinux
PingOO Linux
Plamo Linux
PLD
Project Ballantain
PROSA
Rabid Squirrel
Red Linux
Red Flag
Red Hat
Repairlix
Rock Linux
Scrudgeware
Serial Terminal
ShareTheNet
Slackware
Small Linux
Spiro
spyLinux
Stampede
Stataboware
Storm Linux
SuSE
Think Blue Linux
TimeSys Linux/RT
TINY
Tom Linux
Tomsrtbt
Trinux
TurboLinux
VA-enhanced Red Hat
VectorLinux
Vine Linux
WholeLinux
WinLinux 2000
Xdenu
XTeamLinux
Yellow Dog Linux
ZipSlack
ZipSpeak

Now all I need is one of those s/390's to install these suckers on!

Re:No existing OS meets your criteria

[DavidOgg]

Big Iron is not dead, no cluster has the I/O of Big Iron, anyway, I think he was talking OS/software, not hardware.

Bad Link

[sulli]

The link said: "The parameter is incorrect." Try this.

Erm, s/\bd\b/c/;

[Ptolemarch]

Blargh. Make that "c".

I know you've heard this before but...

[Geccoman]

I just keep on truckin' with Slack.

Re:I know you've heard this before but...

[bluemerlin]

Hail slack its comfy and simple

Re:I know you've heard this before but...

[Master Bait]

Hear hear. I've never had much luck using rpm. I'm sure i missed something somewhere (rpm -yesIReallyWantToInstall --initDBforSure --forceExceptforMonthsWithAn_R_InTheName). Maybe it's my tendency to make typos.

Slack is very comfortable for me.

blessings,

Not for gamers

[cfish]

What makes you think Perl is "USELESS STUFF"?

With the exception of a weak argument on office software, every single criteria you have mentioned relate to games. Linux is not a gamers' OS. You'd be happier with a Playstation then a real computer.

(Being just as good as Windows is no use?) Again, in many areas, especially that of networking and multi-users, Windows is not even close.

But then again, why don't you weight you BeOS on the same criteria and see for yourself?

Re:Not for gamers

[be-fan]

Perl is useless if you don't use it. I don't use it, but most distros force you to install it anyway.

1) Would you care to argue that office software point? StarOffice has fewer features and isn't really more stable than MS Office. Who cares if the OS is stable if the office suite is unstable. WordPerfect2K isn't that stable either. Also, in terms of features, MS Office has many things the other two don't expecially for spread sheets and presentations.

2) How do GIMP, Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, iMovie, and 3D Studio MAX relate to games? Please, let me know. These aren't apps that nobody uses you know. I know a lot of (regular) people that fiddle with Truespace SE, or edit images in Photoshop LE. My friends use Fireworks a lot, and all those iMac users use iMovie. Linux has nothing comparable. Linux is weak in games, very weak. And games are a big market for consumer PCs. Linux is still weak in apps too. If you're a desktop user, chances are that Linux apps either don't have all the features you need, or aren't simple enough to use. Most Linux apps are middle-ground type stuff. While GIMP isn't as easy to use as MSPhoto Editor, it doesn't have all the features of Photoshop. If you need the power of either, then you're ass-out. Variety is important. One app doesn't fit everybody's needs. (Yet another reason why all those people making X toolkits should go work on something usefull.) Not to mention the fact that Linux is severely lacking in several software catagories. Notably
A) WYSIWYG editors. Yes they suck, but not everone wants (or needs) to learn HTML.
B) Photo editors. Sure there are image editors, but I don't see anything on Linux that is a good match for that simple stuff that comes with your scanner.
C) Super-high-end apps like 3D Studio, Photoshop, Premiere, SoundForge, Cakewalk, etc, are totally non-existant. Not only that, but no Linux apps have features even comparable to the features of those programs.
D) AOL. Believe it or not, there are 12 million people out there that will never use Linux until it gets AOL.
E) Games. If you took a look at the figures for PC games sales, you wouldn't say that "I'd be happier with a Playstation."
F) Code-generator-type apps. Sure there is a port of Delphi on the way, but I don't see it yet.
G) Need I go on? I'm running out of letters here.

Sure the Linux software lineup meets the needs of a lot of people, but in the specific case we're talking about (read messages in context to their replys, we're talking about whether or not Linux will own 15% of the home market within a year) but for home users, it doesn't.

Linux is not good in the things that are important to home users. Networking and multi-users are decidedly non-important. If Linux were equal to Windows in the other areas, (which I shall enumerate shortly), then multi-user and good networking would be a nice perk. However, it's a small advantage compared to all the disadvantages Linux has.
A) It's still too hard. Unless your computer is blessed by God and happens to jibe with the driver in your distro (how likely is that?) then you still have to do some config work. Also, there are dozens of little annoyances still present. For example, you have to give the IRQs and DMAs of your ISA sound card. You have to recompile the kernel if you want certain features. (It annoys me how many people tell me Linux is easy to use, but say if I want to do some particular thing I should use this or that patch for the kernel.) You don't get gamma controls in X. You can't arbritarily control refresh rate. You often have to live with stuff you don't need (I don't use Sendmail, why the hell does RedHat 6.1 load it by deafault? Before you answer, remember that the solution cannot involve the command line.)
B) It still lacks important software.
C) It really isn't any faster than Windows if you use a reasonable system. Sure WindowMaker may do it for you, but most home users need GNOME and KDE (both for proper app support) and in that configuration, Linux isn't any faster or smoother than NT. It's smoother than Win98, but isn't faster than it. Worse, KDE2 apps take insanely long to startup, even longer than windows explorer with Active Desktop enabled. And I'm talking about a Slackware 7.1 XFree86 4.01 machine here, I'm sure 3.6.x (which comes with most distros) is worse.
D) It's more stable. It's definately more stable. However, many of the important apps are flaky (StarOffice, Netscape) so the stability aspect is somewhat negated.
E) It has much worse hardware support. There is decent 3D acceleration for only a handfull of cards, and even on those cards that are well accelereated (NVIDIA) the Windows version is still faster. Not to mention the fact that there is no support for 3D sound cards or force-feedback joysticks.

Given these things, what's the point of running Linux on a home machine? All you really gain is stability and maybe $90 for not having to upgrade Windows.

I didn't compare BeOS on those criteria. However, notice that I didn't say that 15% of home users would be using BeOS within a year...

However, to be fair, BeOS does still have some advantages over Linux on the desktop. It's faster, and there is some genuinely innovative software for it. However the hardware support is worse, and there is a dearth of apps. Still, it fills my needs, and the needs of many others. I can do most stuff from BeOS, reboting (to NT) only to do rendering, image editing, or DirectX coding. If your needs are simlar to mine, or your needs are very simple and you just need a fast, stable OS that has all the software you need, then give it a try. For a lot of people, who just do simple word processing and play around on the Internet, BeOS makes a great OS. However, if it doesn't fit your needs, then don't use it. I don't proclaim it suitable for the general computing public like many Linux users proclaim Linux is.

No Surprise

[Bouncings]

It's really no surprise. As standards merge more of their styles of doing things (LSB slowly developing), it's easier to switch from one to another. Also, Red Hat has for a long time held the title of being the best for newbies, and with all the other distributions catching up and passing it up in that category, you gotta figure.

Finally, I might note that Corel had really bad timing. It is good in theory and is nice to see Debian-based Linux distros. If only they were to wait for Potato and base it off that. (Actually, I'm typing from a Corel Linux box right now -- it's pretty slick on a work network with Windows'ish stuff flying around allover. Comes shipped with Acrobat, Netsc(r)ape and a slick little Samba browser)

Re:No Surprise

[Rhys Dyfrgi]

What's the name of that Samba browser? I haven't seen anything good in that area...
---

Re:No Surprise

[Keel]

RedHat is easy to install compared to what? Maybe compared to Debian and Slackware. But Mandrake and Caldera (and Corel from what I hear) are much easier to install than RedHat. You said RedHat need a push to stay current. I agree... too bad it isn't working. I consider their distro about a year out of date.

Re:No Surprise

[Boiler99]

I agree. RedHat may not be the most secure, most powerful, or smallest distro, but it is *very* easy to install (esp from cd, ftp could use a nice interface) and comes with several canned installs. I don't use the canned installs, but for someone who dosen't understand how the file structure/partitions are set up it could really help.

The one major problem I have with RedHat is that it is a bloated install compared to other distros. There are several other small things that upset me (like RPM's dependencies, etc) but all in all it is quite useful for a decent client or a gateway/IP masq box when properly firewalled.

Personally I'm glad there is competition between distros, RedHat sometimes gets a little too fat and happy as it is, they need the push every once in a while to stay current.

Re:Can the open source model support such growth?

[ichimunki]

You've been reading the MS Anti-Linux FAQ haven't you?

Let's see. The OS becomes more popular. So somehow the available knowledge pool shrinks to the point where developers are supporting newbie installations? The OS becomes more ubiquitous, therefore people stop developing for it and it's no longer cutting edge?

The idea that Linux is a small market OS that relies on spare time is a myth, although this has been true, it's quickly changing. There are several businesses who exist solely to develop and sell Linux solutions (whether they are viable is another question, but I think they will be). The Free Software Foundation (albeit a non-profit charity) has taken in several $100K in donations according to their "Thank GNUs" page, some of it from major hardware corps like IBM-- and their software is Free! As people start to realize that they don't have to be addicted to proprietary OS'es, the primary selling point of Linux won't be it's zero price tag, it will be the Freedom, something many of us are happy to spend a little money to preserve. In fact, some of the distro companies right now are basically using free ISO downloads as a loss-leader. It is not wise to clam up the servers right now, since it will alienate the people you need to hook the most, but there is nothing in the GPL that says they have to provide free downloads of compiled software in install-ready form-- certainly RMS encourages charging mightily for distribution costs, so that money can be given to developers. It's quite possible that at some point giving away binaries and whole distributions for free is going to be seen as doing the Free Software community a disservice, since it does nothing to help pay people for all their hard work.

Re:Market share by type

[ralmeida]

Makes me wonder, what is it really behind the success of a distro? Technical facts, or marketing?

I'll talk about the distro I use, Slackware. It was the first distribution I tried -- and I think it'll be the last.

I have installed other distributions for a few friends -- namely, Red Hat, Calera, Debian, Conectiva and Corel. But all of them lack what makes Slackware so special: simplicity.

I believe that Slackware is a successfull distribution, not because of marketing, but because it gives you a GNU/Linux system. It's yours. You run vi and configure everything, and everything is under your fingertips.

Sure, it's not for everybody. But it's easy to install -- although not graphically appealing. It make you learn lots of things about how to run you box; and this is a Good Thing (tm).

And Slackware is almost always forgotten. But it's successfull, because people who use it keep using it, and the word about this clean, stable, transparent system spread with them.

(Slack also has a great forun, by the way. Answers almost never stay unanswered, and there's really a sense of "community).

I would really like to thank Patrick for this great distribution... :)

--

Market share by type

[Uruk]

There really aren't *too* many different distributions, there are just a holy sh**tload of distributions marketed under different names with very subtle (and sometimes meaningless) differences between them.

What I'd like to see is marketshare information by type of distro. Since a large number of users are using redhat, debian, or a knockoff of one of the two, I'd be interested to see how it stacks up by type. (i.e. debian-type as in debian, storm, corel, etc, and redhat type, redhat, mandrake, etc)

Even if corel is dead, it doesn't mean debian is. Makes me wonder, what is it really behind the success of a distro? Technical facts, or marketing?

Re:Market share by type

[Chalst]

How do you decide what `family' a distribution belongs to? Package
management system isn't enough, since SuSE is a very different beast
to Redhat (due to configuration management), but uses RPMs.

One thing that struck me as odd in the article was the comment
about `betting your company' on a distribution: well, it isn't
completely trivial to switch from one distribution to another, but I
can't see how anyone could regard making the change as a disaster.

Re:Market share by type

[Bruce Perens]

In Linux you either join the crowd or hit a brick wall

No, thanks, leave that kind of thinking back in the Microsoft world.

Corel is failing because of other reasons: their policy to be bad citizens of the free software community rather than good partners is the biggest reason. Nobody knowledgable wanted to recommend them. I still remember suggesting to a Corel P.R. person that they assign someone to listen to the free software community's complaints online and address what they said. She actually sneered. These are the folks who made major changes to KDE and then held them back 6 months, until they could no longer be merged back into KDE. They took software that had to a large extent been written by legal minors and applied a license that didn't allow those same legal minors to use the software! They changed the licenses of other people's software for a beta test in ways that violated those licenses.

After that, we get to their applications. Word Perfect is a Windows executable running emulated under WINE. This is so absurd that people don't believe it unless they actually test the software. It doesn't work very well. IMO the pending GPL release of StarOffice strikes the death knell for Corel. Most of their advantages go down the drain with that.

Anyway, the study is farcial because it counts sales, not installed systems. Thus, Debian doesn't get reported.

Bruce

Re:Market share by type

[nematoad]

Added to which the changeover from NT4 to Win2000 looks like it could be full of pitfalls and expensive hardware changes. And this with two products from the same company. Hmmm, makes you wonder if the old saw "You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time," isn't true. I know, I have probably misquoted but you get the drift.

Re:Market share by type

[Ptolemarch]

well, it isn't completely trivial to switch from one distribution to another, but I can't see how anyone could regard making the change as a disaster.

Quite so. Or, for that matter, switching from some distro of Linux to any of the BSDs.

You essentially have three (business-able) OS groups out there: Unix (and Unix-like), Windows, and MacOS. Switching between any of those groups to the other *would* be a disaster. And Unix is the only one of those "groups" that is owned by more than a single company.

Which makes Unix a special case. Within Unix you have HP-UX, Solaris, Irix, Ultrix, a few other proprietary systems, BSDi, Linux, and the Free/Net/Open BSDs. It's important to remember, though, that most Unixes require specialized hardware. Linux, the Free/Net/Open BSDs, and Solaris are the only exceptions of any merit (which rules out SCO) that I can see.

Now, Solaris' hardware support for Intel sucks. Linux and the BSDs are really the only OSes that can be both 1: used on other hardware with little disadvantage and 2: interchanged on the same hardware while maintaining binary compatibility.

So, yes, in all, I quite agree with you in that ones choice of Linux distro is hardly a "betting the company" type of decision.

Does this count magazine distributions?

[weeble]

I notice that the distributions that are growing the fastest are those that tend to be distributed on magazines.

We downloaded one copy of RH6.2 and have it on numerous servers. I would assume those obtaining it via magazine are more likely to have it one only one or two machines.

Sorry cannot say more as I believe the link to have been /.. already!

Re:Does this count magazine distributions?

[dr.thundr]

I noticed this too, I have a butt load of Turbo Linux CD's laying around (drink coasters) since I use RedHat 6.1, I started with RedHat four years ago.

Slackware market share?

[Maddog_Delphi97]

I may have missed it, but what was the market share of slackware?

Re:Slackware market share?

[DB Lackey]

Around .000001%

Its funny to see all these companies

[Rombuu]

Fighting to be the top dog of a market that you can't make any money in.

Who-hoo! I'm #1! I'm losing money the fastest!

Re:Can the open source model support such growth?

[steveha]

If Linux becomes a popular OS can it really attract sufficent people to ensure the OS and its applications remain cutting edge?

Of course it can!

If Linux is more popular, then there is a larger pool of people interested in its success. That means more people contributing stuff.

If a large portion of the people are willing to pay for a commercial distro, then the distro companies have more money to spend on developers.

Even if we assume that people don't ever want to pay for Linux, the larger pool still means more contributions. Suppose that Company X wants to roll out Linux, but Linux is missing one crucial feature. Perhaps Company X can hire someone to add that feature, for less money than buying Windows 2000 for everyone in Company X. Once the feature is added, it's there forever and everyone can use it.

Try as I might, I just can't imagine any way for large numbers of users to be a problem making Linux grow less quickly.

steveha

Re:Liberal conspiracy to destroy Microsoft?

[bbcat]

Pathetic moron! George Bush (not the boob but
his father) started the fight against Microsoft.
The inquiry was slowed down when the democrats
got into office but the justice dept eventually
was allowed to get back in the game.

This is just a case of the laws being enforced
and to claim that enforcing the laws is a liberal
idea is ridiculous.

Both liberals and conservatives want laws to
be respected, only criminals don't.

Re:Can the open source model support such growth?

[theMAGE]

Well... even if 1000 vb programmers install Linux and play with it this doesn't mean that Linux and Alan give up Linux for Windows...

No matter how many newbies enter the ranks of the Linux users... there is enough place for everyone.

Or you do think you have to use all of 1,500 applications SuSE ships on their CD?

Accretion and evolution

[FreekyGeek]

One of the beauties of the Linux world is that even as comanies and distributions and come and go, as long as they open-source the stuff they do, even if they die, the good parts of what thev's done get left behind and aded to Linux overall, making it better. This process seems similar to evolution, or maybe the accretion that forms coral reefs.

If "Company A" writes "Awesome Install Program X", and open-sources it, then even if Company A later dies, the good work still remains behind and gets added to the body of Linux code, improving future versions. In this way, good code still gets passed on even if individual distributions may go away.

Re:Distributing pure funk

[excesspwr]

Now I dont want to start a huge distro flaming war because everytime one breaks out it's just silly, however; I have also been using SuSE for a couple years but not after trying R.H., Mandrake, and Caldera. The reason I stayed with SuSE is for the large amount of programs I get (6 CD's!!! How great is that?! To bad they changed that with the new release unless you buy the "professional" edition, which is still worth it to me...you may feel different and please flame away) and the configuration programs they have. The only reason I'm saying this is to back Graymalkin's point. Which is a good one. Now to argue one of his/her points. The basic point behind a distro is to "distribute" Linux, I could be wrong here though because there is the money thing. Which they all do very well and I say this because I have never had a problem finding a distro in the stores when I go looking for it or being in stock on the net. What you do get with a distro is all pretty much just butter. I'd be willing to pay $19.95 for a Linux distro (being only a CD, the kernel, and enough programs to get it installed and connected to the net for downloading the rest of what I actually want to have on there...and I only have a dialup connection.) The time they would have saved me getting those few programs on a bootable CD-ROM so I can take care of the rest exactly how I want it is worth the 20 bucks. Thats all they really need to do. The rest of it we have just come to expect. Which is wrong. Here's why: A competitor who shall remain nameless but will be referenced from here on as M$ sells an OS for ~$150US which comes with just basic software (enough to get you set up and going to go "purchase" the rest of the software you want) ,however; Linux distros include tons of free (as in beer and speech) software with their distribution on CD which you don't have to spend your precious bandwidth and time on getting for a price much more resonable then M$. That's more than what you could ask for a company to do. I often feel like I'm ripping them off, but I love it!!! So basically unless a distros price becomes outrageous I dont think they really need to go out on a limb for me they already do more than enough for my needs to get my money.

All right!! Who needs the mainstream?

[daemonc]

Maybe if they lose enough of the mainstream market it won't be so un-hip to use Redhat?

I run Redhat. I know that makes me less "l33T" than if I ran, say, Slackware. I bought my Redhat CD, way back at 6.0, with the book. As a newbie I found their book to be somewhat helpful. I still run Redhat because I just haven't found anything that better suits me. I'm not enough of a zealot for Debian, I don't know anything about Suse or Turbolinux, and Mandrake just scares me. So Redhat it is. It's a great system for those who like to tweak and mess around with the system, but don't want to worry about breaking it completely. Although the stability of the next release is anyone's guess, 6.2 has been a good solid base for me.

Besides, what other distro has such a bad-ass logo to compare with the shadowy guy in the red fedora?

Re:Mandrake market share?

[afc]

What is a 'r33t h4x0r'? A Japanese script kiddie with a heavy accent?
--

Re:So where's Debian?

[Bruce Perens]

It can be sold, but it is sold by 50 different companies, not all (or even not any) of which were surveyed. Nor are the free downloads surveyed.

In any case, the survey is bogus. Counting installed systems would be about 10 times as accurate as counting sales. How many organizations buy 1 CD and use it to install 10 systems?

Thanks

Bruce

Re:debian and the future of linux

[RestiffBard]

well, i think you're missing my point. Linux
distros will hold your hand to a degree in the
area of partitioning and such. But, what
happens when your video card or some other device
crucial to getting the system working doesn't
without tweaks? Windows doesn't hold your hand
it directs it. Until linux can do that we will
remain a hobbyists and experts community. The
only proof that open source works is if everyone
can use it. not just the geeks

I'd like some Asian localization :)

[Bill Kendrick]

With the Linux market growing so much in the Asian market (ie, Turbo Linux), and with a number of my free Linux games being mentioned in 3 or 4 Japanese Linux magazines in the last 6 months, I'd love help localizing my games to Japan. :)

Re:200,000 Slashdot fans can't be wrong

[be-fan]

Would you like to quote where you got the idea Linux will own 15% of the desktop market in a year? I quote from ZDnet

"International Data Corp. predicts a 25% annual
growth rate for Linux into the new millennium"

HOWEVER, same article,

" Linux is making steady
progress on the server side, especially for must-stay-up
installations. But it's making no dent in Windows NT's
growth as the standard OS for departmental servers. And
it is light years away from being a threat to anybody on the desktop."

What you must remember is that it is fairly hard to track the number of desktop users of Linux. Most desktop users tend to download it, compared to corperate users who buy it (for technical support.) Thus, there are not statistics on desktop usage of Linux. However, remember that while Linux is having phenominal growth, that's mainly in the server sector. In the desktop market, distros like Corel Linux and McMillan, and Mandrake are selling poorly (compared to the Windowses.) Also, even BeOS had a home computer with it preinstalled (AST machines.) Even if you see the same for Linux, one preinstall is quite far away from 15% of the market.

Re:Farewell, OldHat, and good riddance

[spankenstein]

Debian is slow to mark a release as "stable" however the "unstable" branch is very up to date.

Re:HAHA!!! I told you this would happen!

[pid777]

you must be one dumb muther f. did u READ the article. (now as a small aside to most of the flames i read on /., READING the articles is KEY to understanding the topic) If you READ the article you would see that linux aggregate sales are UP 89%, now if u take into account the 10% RELETIVE sales loss you see that infact, Redhat still GAINED customers.

Mandrake market share?

[steveha]

The most interesting comment, to me, was that Mandrake would most likely stay off the radar in the US, but might gain significant market share in Europe. Mandrake is similar to a Red Hat distribution with an excellent, graphical installer and extra cool stuff bundled. Why would people ignore Mandrake and go with Red Hat?

My own theory: Mandrake is more interesting as a desktop install, not as a server install, and server installs are where most of the market interest is at the moment.

By the way, if you haven't checked out Mandrake, you should. The graphical hard disk partitioning utility is so cool, you might want to keep a Mandrake CD around just to use it.

steveha

Re:Mandrake market share?

[AntiBasic]

Why would people ignore Mandrake and go with Red Hat?

What they hear is all that matters. Some newbie r33t h4x0r hears of Linux so he uses RedHat. Now if you move up (so to speak) you'll realize that RedHat has some third party software other distro's don't.

...server installs are where most of the market interest is at the moment.

Uhm...no. Most of the Linux installs are done as desktops. Don't believe me? Go look at the SuSE FAQ.

Re:Good to see Corel Linux almost dead

[AntiBasic]

How did Corel tar the good name of Linux? Corel has arguably done the most for Linux in the past year than any other company! Its nice to see how you ignored Word Perfect 2000 suite and Corel Draw. Plus you bypassed their contributions to WINE. Even though I may HATE Linux, Corel has done a lot of good for it. Go troll somewhere else son.

Re:Farewell, OldHat, and good riddance

[Boiler99]

Um, no.

1) ATI video cards do *plenty* of things wrong, even in Windows. They have traditionally had transparency problems as well as not being fully compatable with the DirectX API...OK, so the drivers included in RedHat don't work completely, but neither do the drivers for Win98. I have several games that specifically say they do not support ATI chipsets...

2) Nagging bugs...OK, try updating your GNOME packages from the ones installed on the disc, the ones I have run perfectly fine even on my Athlon with an NVIDIA vid card. I recommend Helix GNOME since it is easy for newbies to install.

3) OldHat...RedHat may be slow to update packages, but not *nearly* as slow as Debian has. Try to learn about the distros before bashing one.

I'm not trying to say that RedHat is the best, most stable, smallest, or anything else, I'm just saying that you are far too opinionated about this distro for the amount you know about linux in general. Enjoy your Windows 2000, there are only 63,000 documented bugs left...

SuSE - the choice of a dialup generation

[uebernewby]

Or at least, it's favored in Europe precisely because cable isn't as widespread here and you have to pay for your local calls. So a distro that contains six cd's worth of apps is very worthwile over here, especially since it's just as expensive as the lesser hung Red Hat.

Furthermore, SuSE has succeeded in getting a number of universities in Germany on their side, which doesn't really hurt them either.

--rant on-- BTW, why does RH insist on installing Gnome even when you explicitly demand a KDE workstation? Sure, I know how to fix it (now), but it seems a bit obtrusive to me. To be fair, though, SuSE (KDE sponsors) insist on warning you that GNOME is still in early beta stage as well. --rant off--

Re:SuSE - the choice of a dialup generation

[jfunk]

To be even more fair, note the message that comes up when you enter the kpa diskset.

It warns you that the applications are alpha and unstable, even though many of them are quite stable, they simply have <1 version numbers. I can't live without many of those apps, Kuickshow, Gehieimnis, Korganiser, Kdevelop, Kcmdate, Kmysqladmin, Ksysv, and, of course Kfortune.

turbolinux

[scm]

I got a copy of TurboLinux with my Linksys PCMCIA ethernet card. Stuff like that probably helps. I haven't used it since it was new. Maybe I'll give it a try again.

makes sense

[josepha48]

In the pacific RIm they are growing in there adoption of Linux. It is inexpensive, which is one thing that they like, TurboLinux has a presense there which RH does not. Suse is big in Euroland, so that leaves Cladera an RH for the US. Caldera is actually producing pretty good distro these days from what I have seen, and were one of the first to do the full X GUI install. So it makes sense.

Corel added crap into KDE that added problems to people who tried to compile other programs against it, atleast that is what out on slashdot a while ago, which probably pissed some people off. Corel seems to have gone down the tubes in all its business though that is another story.

I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!

Re:Can the open source model support such growth?

[Bun]

As greater amounts of less technically able users begin to adopt the OS, then this could cause problems in that too few Linux users will actually be contributing to the maintenence and upgrading of the OS itself. Quite simply, Linux has for a long time been a small market OS that has relied on its users contributing there spare time and energy to the actual specifics of the OS. If Linux becomes a popular OS can it really attract sufficent people to ensure the OS and its applications remain cutting edge?

I really don't understand your logic here. It's flawed in all sorts of ways:

Your concerned that as the user/developer ratio ->0, Linux won't be able to compete with 'cutting edge' technologies. Now how does that ratio differ from any commercial software product you care to mention?

Even if the number of core developers doesn't grow at the same rate as the OS use, it doesn't matter. The number will grow, since the OS is open and anyone can look under the hood. Contrast this with a closed-source OS that is limited by the developer resources (money) an organization can throw at it. It's almost no contest. The open source project can expand to the practical limits bounded by the organization governing its code. No private project can match that.

I'm not even sure your base premise is even valid since:

How will more developers contribute to the improvement of the OS? Development is proceeding at a furious pace as it is. Throwing more bodies at a problem doesn't always lead to faster development.

Re:Good to see Corel Linux almost dead

[MonkeyHanger]

Yes but they have done a lot VERY badly. Corel Linux took down more systems than any distro Ive ever heard about (Corel Linux killed not only my exisiting Linux setup but also killed Windows), Word Perfect 2000 suite was the biggest crock ever. They took the win version and optomised it for WINE, not exactly a major re-engineering job was it?

I'm still not so sure

[NuclearArchaeologist]

Let me think of the advantages that convinced me to put Linux on my desktops at home. Stability, yes speeed, compactness, ease of instalation, X, compilers, IP apps, and empowerment. That empowerment is something important MS has forgoten about in it's rush to destroy the companies that made their OS so attractive to begin with. I've learned more faster and been lied to less with Linux, and I can run it on supposedly obsolete hardware as well as faster stuff. Oh yeah, it's free too. Word Perfect had a click through liscence that I happily punched.

Hardware and apps will follow the shift that is comming. You can keep the MS Office.

I can tell you dozens of stories of smoldering resentment from my workplace. NT crawls and crashes. People curse and cry. This is where the next big growth may come from, and they will provide the easy apps.

A company that can offer reasonable support for small companies can make a killing with OSS. I wish them all the best.

Who knows though? I think it's ready now.

Re:I'm still not so sure

[be-fan]

So you seriously think Linux will own 15% of the desktop market with a YEAR! Do you realize what kind of growth rate that would take? To clue you in, there are somewhere around 300 million copies of Windows out there. Millions of PCs ship every year. Right now, not ONE consumer vendor ships with Linux preinstalled. Not even Dell, which is pretty supportive of Linux, ships Linux on home machines. Eventually Linux might succeed in this market, but not that soon, and not in it's present state.

Second...
Stability: Yes, it's more stable.
Speed: A nominal desktop config with GNOME 1.2, KDE2.0, and XFreee86 4.0 is slower than a comparable WindowsNT machine. Sure you can say, "oh, but with WindowMaker Linux is faster" but then you can't say that Linux has an object model and a good desktop environment. Also, nominally, both GNOME and KDE have to be installed (Gnapster is good, KDevelop is good) which bloats up the system and uses more memory. 3D on WindowsNT is still significantly faster, it seems to handle multimedia better (though I don't have any benchmarks of that) and the system feels much more responsive.
Compactness: How? My super-tweeked Slackware 7.1 config takes up 650MB. 200MB base system, 100-something for X, and with GNOME and KDE installed, 650MB. My comparable Windows NT install with all the little utilities and IE takes up 294MB, plus 150MB for Visual Studio (since I've got KDevelop)=450MB. What were you saying about compact?
Ease of installation: It's only easy if you don't tweek it. I had to recompile XFree86 4.01 (since there aren't Slack packages) I had to manually edit the network config files (to set up NAT and my second ethernet card) I had to edit modules.conf for ALSA, I had to edit XFree86config for the NVIDIA drivers, I had to use xf86config to configure XFree4.0, and I had to recompile the kernel. Aside from recompiling the kernel, my NT configuration is functionally similar, and took much less time and effort.
X: This is an advantage HOW?
IP apps: True, networking is great on Linux.
Empowerment: Empowerment for me is being able to run at the highest frame-rates, render quickest, and have my desktop redraw without flicker. What about you?

Re:I'm still not so sure

[NuclearArchaeologist]

I really think Linux is comming. There's some of excitement about it I have not seen since Win3.1. As to specific market share, who knows. There are 250,000,000 people in the US. When a significant fraction of them get on, look out.

Empowerment is knowing what's going on in your machine. It comes from man pages and source code. This is very important. When you need it, you can find it and that's how you managed to edit all of those config files by hand. Nothing is hidden.

On compactness, I suppose it depends on what you want. 650MB is not a lot of hard drive these days. You can install a reasonable X workstation in 500MB if you use Debian. I've got a reasonable Red Hat install on 650MB, and I've got a Debian Terminal install (does telnet, mail, pine, emacs, vi, as a couple other things) on a 100MB. The terminal runs nice and fast with a MGA amber screen and was good enough to log into other machines. Given a $75 4 gig hard disk, you will never feel cramped unless you start to fool with sound or video files. Oh yes, you can fit Word Perfect on the 650MB system. A big fat Red Hat Everything install will fit in under a gig. Strip down what you don't want and it gets smaller. K is kind of fat, and I don't use it. You do know that MSIE has a 500MB footprint by default? Try to get rid of it. My NT machine at work is choking a 3 gig hard drive to death. MS Office exploded the only machine I was dumb enough to put it on at home (damn default did not load equation editor!).

You would enjoy the OpenBSD install. The default takes care of as many network cards as you have. Debian does this too. I hate MS installs. They take forever, make mistakes, and have to be spoon fed all the way through. Linux installs take less than half the time a 98 install does and its so much less painful. Each Linux install I do gets easier, each MS install is more painful. Mandrake has a great install, and I can only imagine that they will continue to get better.

MS has gotten a lot of mileage out of it's little windowing system. My wife made me laugh the other day when she their older version Windows 93. How was it that the nice simple 16MB system became the monster it is today? They could have gotten a lot more out of it if they could tollerate another software company working with them. Think about it, are there any healthy Windows software companies out there? SSI X, Correl X, Lotus X, Netscape X, Borland X, Sybase X. Any company that's ever tried to work with MS has ended up in the toilet. The only thing that I can say for sure is that MS is going to follow.

X has great modularity and open standards. I like being able to export display from other machines to my terminal. It's never crashed on me and I'm told that it won't take my system down if it does.

Pick a crowd, any crowd.

[darkonc]

In Linux you either join the crowd or hit a brick wall
No, thanks, leave that kind of thinking back in the Microsoft world.

The open source philosophy is a crowd-based one. A thousand eyeballs requires about half that many developers. The difference with Open Source is that you always have the choice of creating your own crowd. In Corel's case they seem to have attempted this third option in precisely the rong way.

I'll start from the claim that they chose Debian because it would differentiate them from the other other popular distributions when they stole a big market share with their PR machinery. If this is true, then it can be likened to shooting yourself in the foot -- Grenade jumping with an auto-cannon style for those quake/half-life types.

They separated themselves from the marked leaders. This meant that the consumer-friendly software packets weren't available for their consumer crowd. At the same time, they pissed off the geek/developer Debian crowd by not wholeheartedly joining the code-release game. They seem to have thought that their market clout could give them enough consumer numbers to force third-party developers to bow to them.

Probably their core mistake was underestimating the value of word-of-mouth advertising. Having pissed off the current user base all they did was attract attention to Corel Linux. The general public, not knowing much of Linux, would hear of Corel and go to their geek friends and ask: "So what about this Corel version?"

Had Corel been wholeheartedly a supporter of the Open Source approach, they might have actually gained some real market share. Instead the geek reaction was likely to be "I don't like what I've heard about them doing". Without wholhearted geek respect, Corel couldn't really take a bite out of the newbie market. Add to that the problem that the commonly released software for the Debian base presumed an intelligent user who could take care of themselves (as opposed to the Corel market of interested newbies) and you have a serious 'grenade jump with autocannon' (Read: shoot yourself in the foot bigtime trying to get a jump on the competition).

Distributing pure funk

[Graymalkin]

I've been using SuSE for a couple years now, I'm happy to see that its market share is gaining on RH. Not because I want to see RH die but because I think SuSE is a great distro. The problem I have seen in my years using Linux is no distro really going out of their way to make a Linux system that was original and went out on a limb. The difference between distros is very small, the base Linux system is virtually identical as are the third party apps packaged with the distro, the real difference comes in the config tools as the arrangement of certain things (most of these differences exist in /sbin and /usr). I would like to see a completely original Linux system. How about bash+ with better realtime language support (i.e. move all the files in this directory to that one then delete this one) and some standardization of included packages. Sure it might limit the "choice" of users but if you're so hardcore on what you want on your system build your own fucking distro. What new users want is the consistancy that Windows and MacOS offer by default. You don't have 20 apps that all do pretty much the exact same thing only with different commands and names (for the most part). Distros: stop renaming the same cloned system, venture forth and do good!

Re:Dodgy statistics

[jdfox]

I see: so you're saying that you deliberately linked to the WordPerfect page, and claimed WP's ranking was really the ranking for Corel Linux. But you didn't say that in your original post, did you?
You work for Corel, right?

Very true. Stormix == best Linux Distribution.

[cvillopillil]

Welcome to Storm Linux. Please feel free to visit us at our website.

http://www.stormlinux.com/

Or email us if you have any questions.

feedback@stormix.com

Last login: Wed Aug 23 16:49:48 on ttyp1 from 192.168.1.15

No mail.

$ uptime

11:41am up 79 days , 26 min, 1 user, load average: 0.06, 0.01, 0.00

$

I think that pretty much ends the distribution wars. Download Stormix today. It's based on Debian GNU/Linux and as you can see, it's more stable than other Linux distributions. Probably rivals the BSDs in stability, in fact.

Re:Very true. Stormix == best Linux Distribution.

[JamesGreenhalgh]

79 days isn't actually a very long time for a machine to run.

From a FreeBSD server I have access to:

9:58AM up 129 days, 12:19, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

And even 129 isn't very high, I've seen linux and *BSD boxes alike with a couple hundred days uptime.

Some food for thought:

10:00am up 441 days, 19:07, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.11, 0.15

Thats an hp-ux machine ;-) It was bought and installed approximately 443 days ago.

james

Re:Caldera has been around almost as long as RH

[aanantha]

I wonder what we'd be able to gain. Kind of a strange thought that it could be Caldera, a long time Linux vender, that releases the source code to SVR4. But I suppose the core SVR4 code is worthless. Linux 2.4 can do everything it does, but better. And for the stuff Linux and BSD can't do, it's easier to implement from scratch than porting SVR4's stuff. The journalled filesystem is VERITAS's, so that won't be released. What's left?

Re:To be fair you should post an update

[haggar]

That article is not based on IDC data at all!!! Do moderators actually read what's behind these links?

Re:Corel is actualy #3 and rising

[haggar]

The link "IDC stats for July" http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT= 104&STORY=/www/story/09-06-2000/00013053 22&EDATE=

has nothing to do with IDC whatsoever! The source is Mandrakesoft, and the data was collected by some anonymous computer group.

Did moderators check what's behind these links? Or is Internet becoming the DisInfromation highway? ;o)

Re:Caldera has been around almost as long as RH

[alba7]

> [...] type dmesg and grep for Caldera.

I bet most poeple won't get any output.
There is a better way to prove this.

root@e6281:~# find /usr/src/linux/ -name '*.c' | xargs grep -i Caldera
/usr/src/linux/net/ipx/af_ipx.c: * Portions Copyright (c) 1995 Caldera, Inc.
/usr/src/linux/net/ipx/af_ipx.c: * Neither Greg Page nor Caldera, Inc. admit liability nor provide
/usr/src/linux/net/ipx/af_ipx.c: printk(KERN_INFO "IPX Portions Copyright (c) 1995 Caldera, Inc.\n");
/usr/src/linux/net/ipx/af_spx.c: * Jim Freeman
/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/slip.c: * from Jim Freeman's
/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/tlan.c: * (C) 1997-1998 Caldera, Inc.
/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/advansys.c: Erik Ratcliffe has done testing of the
/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/advansys.c: AdvanSys driver in the Caldera releases.
/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/kernel/smp.c: * Supported by Caldera http://www.caldera.com.

People don't know what "enterprise" means

[Anonymous Coward]

(Big, frustrated rant ahead)

It really burns me when I see technical pundits talking about "enterprise-class" systems when they clearly have no idea what an "enterprise" is.

Here's a big, fat, spelled-out clue for them: "Enterprise" means more than just "really big". "Enterprise" means more than "lots of bundled pretty lights".

1. Enterprise systems have to be able to handle a tremendous load without sweating. This means lots of processes and lots of threads running smoothly at the same time. When overloaded, enterprise systems degrade gracefully.

Let me spell that out in caps -- ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS DEGRADE GRACEFULLY. They may refuse additional client connections, they may log error messages, but they may not EVER collapse under pressure. Anything less is not an enterprise system. It is a toy. Period.

2. Enterprise systems integrate with existing systems. A REAL enterprise often has legacy systems -- some of which have been running since before the new web developer was out of diapers. Companies offering enterprise solutions like to talk about how well their products work with your existing systems. Companies selling toys also want to help you with "updating", "migrating", or "replacing" your existing systems (which were working just fine before you strolled into my office, twerp). Consider that a red flag.

3. Enterprise systems stay up. In a real enterprise, rebooting costs money. Usually it costs BIG money. A company who doesn't understand that doesn't understand what an enterprise is. Beware -- toy-makers will try to sell you aftermarket add-ons for clustering, failover, or maintaing your "quality of service". Don't be fooled. You will pay more to maintain "quality of service" than you would pay to get a solid system in the first place.

I am so tired of magazines pandering to managers who think that they're running an "enterprise". Real enterprises already HAVE professionals to do these comparisons. They have no choice. In the long run, having a professional who is accountable is whole lot cheaper than trusting some twit at IDG, CNN, or ZDNet.

Now, with that perspective, I ask: do any of these NOS qualify as "enterprise-class"? If not, which ones come closest?

Re:People don't know what "enterprise" means

[MonkeyHanger]

I always thought it was a star-ship :-)

200,000 Slashdot fans can't be wrong

[NuclearArchaeologist]

I'll be a millionaire before the end of the decade.

No, this is not a troll.

Who can really predict the future of this thing? For all we know, MS Linux could outship everyone (puke!). Do you really think Linux won't have 15% of the desktop market by next year? Mandrake won't take off? Extrapolation is difficult. What do you think the people in charge of these distros think?

Re:200,000 Slashdot fans can't be wrong

[be-fan]

Linux definately won't have 15% of the desktop market by next year. Currently it probably has less than 5% and it's growth rate in the desktop market isn't exactly spectacular. Also, Linux currently doesn't offer a tangible advantage to the desktop user.

A) Linux is still lacking some important software catagories. Office software is spotty. Not so much a lack of, but the fact that in general StarOffice and WordPerfect aren't the highest quality applications. The stability of the two are no better than Office, and being just as good as Windows is not good enough. It's also lacking games. As Nintendo will tell you, variety is very important in a game library. Sure Linux has several games, but aside from Quake and UT, the majority of them are older games. Even Descent III is pretty dated. Until Linux get's many "A" titles, it's not going to be a player in the home market. Lastly, there are a severe lack of "best in class" desktop apps in Linux. The whole Office suite is arguably better than WordPerfect (in the database, spreadsheet, and presentation arena, not the word processor) GIMP still doesn't compare to Photoshop, there is still no equivilant for Fireworks or Dreamweaver, 3D Studio MAX still isn't there, etc. Sure all these apps have Linux counterparts, and some of those may be quite good. However, don't think of them as Linux apps, but apps in general. There are a lot of feature and usage issues with Linux apps that Linux diehards usually ignore. Think hard about it. Would Linux apps, if reviewed in a conventional computer magazine, come out with 9's and 10's, or 5's and 6's? Lastly, there is a lack of "simple" software. For example, the iMovie-type software that is so popular. Or basic web-builders like CuteHTML or AOLPress. Stuff that let's ordinary people do basic projects without dealing with a lot of features.

B) The system itself isn't robust enough. Sure it's more stable, but hardware support still sucks. There are only a few 3D graphics cards supported, and poorly at that. (Poorly being defined as not being faster than the Windows versions.) Sound-card support is severly lacking, with half the cool hardware on most modern soundcards being totally unused. That's only if you talk about ALSA. Stuff get's worse with OSS. (A plea, everyone stop programming for OSS. Somethimes a standard just needs to be replaced. Killing OSS and X is like getting rid of ISA. Everyone knows it should be done, but nobody wants to do it.) Then there is the lack of force-feedback support for joysticks. You specifically may not care, but tell that to the guy who spent $200 for his force-feedback wheel. Second, there is no real evidence of what exactly makes Linux better. It's not noticibely faster, it usually takes more harddrive space (a nominal install, you can't get by with Linux without installing GNOME, KDE, and all the useless stuff (for an average desktop user anyway) like Perl, Lisp, Guile, etc.

Sure many of these things will change. However, it will take a lot longer than a year. For Linux to take 15% of the market, it has to be better. Being just as good as Windows is no use. It has to not have any major gaps over Windows and has to totally blow it away in several catagories. Only then will it succeed.

Re:200,000 Slashdot fans can't be wrong

[PurpleBob]

Linux definately won't have 15% of the desktop market by next year. Currently it probably has less than 5% and it's growth rate in the desktop market isn't exactly spectacular.

Would you care to quote where you got that idea? And maybe give a few examples of OSes with a higher growth rate than Linux?
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.

According to what?

[roystgnr]

"According to recent figures from IDC"

Oh, yeah, there's an ultra-clued in group if I've ever heard one.

For comparison, check out this spring's Tucows downloads for some alternative statistics. Can anyone find any more recent stats?

Anyway, this spring, Red Hat's share of new downloaded ISOs ranged from 14-31%. Great. But were it's biggest competitors SuSE, Caldera, and TurboLinux? Hardly. Ahead of Red Hat was Mandrake, which "TechnologyEvaluation.com" does not "believe will make significant inroads in the US". Funny, our local LUG has chosen Mandrake for two or three installfests running now. Oh, yeah, and thanks to Macmillan, Mandrake's leading in retail sales, too...

And maybe Corel is teetering on the edge of death financially, but it's distribution was doing pretty good with 15-29% new market share. Maybe "Corel Linux" will go down with the company, but even then all the good changes would likely be folded into Debian eventually.

stats stats stats....

[dotaubob]

The one good thing about statistics is that you can make them say whatever you need them to.

There was no reference to several distro's so at best the source of the information is crap. What constituted the results? Retail sales? Web downloads? A marketers hype!

IMO Redhad(sic!) only ever had (has) one purpose. That is simply to get people to dump windows and give Linux a try. Then, with any luck they will soon see it is far better than The other OS, and then also see the shortcomings of Redhad and change to a different distro.

While my personal choice is Slakware {Ain't it strage how it was one of the first to be a distro that is still doing it, Must be doing something right by a lot of people), There are lots of good distro theat didn't even get a look in in these attempt at stats.

Re:Mandrake at 4%?

[m3000]

Mandrakeforum.com already had a story explaining it. As someone noted above, this data is pretty old, and Mandrake has some data from July that gives Mandrake the lead with 31.5%.

Redhat 2 was better than slackware and yggdrasil

[maynard]

My primary desktop is a Redhat install I've kept upgrading since Redhat 2.0; that was after I dumped Yddrasil from mid '94 or so. Frankly, they had (at the time) a good package manager, they included a great list of common applications precompiled in package format, and RH-2 and 3.0.3 were excellent distributions. For one thing, I seem to remember that Redhat made the transition from a.out to ELF binary formats faster than anyone else, which made their distribution popular simply because recompiling libc and, ld.so, and binutils, and then recompiling your entire operating system, was a major PITA. Redhat made the transition as simple as plopping in a floppy and a CD. Also, I seem to remember that 3.0.3 attempted an X based install (which was dumped in 4.0) which wowed a bunch of people.

Also, Redhat gave away rpm under the gpl... this gained them significant user and developer mindshare (even though Debian had dpkg out before -- go figure). Redhat promised a simple, easy install from the start -- and they mostly delivered. The complexity of the install process is what killed Debian to begin with (in my recolection), even though the Debian install process allows for much better tailoring of each individual package. Redhat offered a simple way to install Linux without all the hassles of decisions about how to configure hundreds of programs -- which is largely why they took off. And, they've always had a cutting edge distribution with the latest software and tools. This is what wows the newbies, even though after 3.0.3 all of their major new revisions have been a major mess. 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0 were simply unfit for sale... and I think this is why they're losing momentum. Other distributions have done better with quality control while maintaining modern packages... and Redhat is suffering from the competition. Oh well! This is what the free market is all about!

I like Redhat and think they've done a tremendous service to the Linux community. And I own some of their stock... so take what I say knowing I'm (in a small way) an investor. Though, I admit I wish I'd been upgrading a Debian box all these years simply because a five year old RH install has become a real PITA to maintain.

A Better Red Hat Than Red Hat

[ekrout]

Myself and many others "in the know" realized that Red Hat was heading in a downward spiral every since people starting proclaiming Mandrake's flavor or Linux as "a better Red Hat than Red Hat." Moreover, once we installed and played around with Mandrake, we realized that all the hype that surrounded it truly was deserved.
______________________________
Eric Krout

Corel is actualy #3 and rising

[frank249]

If Corel Linux is dying why is it in the top ten in the Computer Shopper Hot Products listing and ranking 385 in sales at Amazon?

It is because Corel Linux is currently #3 in sales and by next month should be number 2. The stats given in the article was from Dec 99. Corel Linux was only released in Nov 99 so obviously it did not have much of a market share in Dec. Since then Corel has launched WPO2K-L, CD9-L, PP9-L and CLOS SE. Since Corel is after the desktop and RedHat is in the server market it is hard to compare. Here are the IDC stats from Jul 2000

Retail sales in July 2000 - Source: PC Data With a 32,966-unit-sample selected by PC Data

1 - Linux-Mandrake: 31,5%

2 - Red Hat: 24,9%

3 - Corel: 23,0%

4 - TurboLinux: 8,4%

5 - SuSE: 6,1%

6 - Caldera: 4,3%

The only reason Mandrake has these numbers is that it is bundled with MacMillan's books. I can tell you that I have their cds in one of the books I bought but they have never been used. If you could find out what people actualy have installed I am sure that Corel would fair better. Now if I can find these stats why can't the rest of the media? Here is IDC for Feb and Nov

Linux®: US RETAIL MARKET SHARE PCDATA RETAIL

Revenue - Share_____Feb-00 _____ Nov-99

Red Hat________ 40.4% _____ 58.5%

Macmillan _____ 19.6% _____ 21.5%

Corel ________ 19.3% _____ 2.3%

S.U.S.E. _____ 7.1% _____ 0.7%

TurboLinux _____ 4.1% _____ 1.1%

Caldera _______ 3.0% _____ 6.9%

The CNet download stats are interesting also. While downloads don't directly translate into revenue they are a good indication of popularity, brand recognition and potential upgrade_apps sales. Total download stats from CNet show:

Corel Linux (since Nov 99) 307,840

RedHat (since Mar 98) 334,857

Caldera 39,495

Mandrake 86,505

SuSE 5,946

WordPerfect 8 for L PE (since Dec 98) 1,134,190

Star Office PE (?) 160,644

If you look at the monthly trend this year you can see that CLOS is more popular than RedHat by 30% and WP almost 350% more than Star Office.

Summary since 30 Apr 00

___________________WP84L_____CLOS_______RedHat____ ____Star Office

27-Aug________________ 5,610______ 3,188_______ 2,728______1,634 weekly snip

25 Jun - 16 Jul_________21,730_____13,304 _____12,501(monthly total)

28 May - 18 Jun_______27,318_____19,573 _____15,106

30 Apr - 21 May ______25,900 _____24,805 _____15,512

Totals________________107,149______81,478_____61 ,103 BTW the above story is just a rip off of a CNet article of 31 Aug Red Hat holds huge Linux lead, rivals growing By Stephen Shankland It also cited these 'recent figures from IDC.

Re:Corel is actualy #3 and rising

[radja]

I'm not sure, because I can't read the article (stupid to post links that require login without giving a login) but it may well have been worldwide rather than US, which the statistics you quote are. a US survey is meaningless to compare against a worldwide survey.

//rdj

debian and the future of linux

[RestiffBard]

well... just to add to the i love this one better list. I've got debian running now and it's great.

also. we all know the only way to know true statistics on usage is through the ever reliable slashdot poll.

finally, I have to agree with be-fan about linux apps. They really do blow. Nothing against those developers busting their butts out there to give us some really cool programs but come on. some of the apps out there really do blow. Also... (flame retardant underwear on) how often have you heard that the benefit of open source is that things move faster. bugs are found and fixed in no time. (personally the kernel is about one of the few things that does get updated on a really regular basis) How long has work on mozilla been going on? and they have code to work from to begin with? And no matter what you may say there is sill no distro that installs as easy as windows. even the easiest distro install can still have problems.

i was thinking earlier (i really can) about gnucash. thats one app that is often touted to show how windows like apps can be found in the open source world. but in quicken i can connect direct to my bank and have my QIF files updated automagically. I really have serious doubts I'll ever get my bank to work with gnucash and i don't care how many petitions we write i just don't see it happening.

you can make as many excuses as you want but linux is strugling and has been for a while. even after MS is broken up they'll still be dominant. folks go on and on about the great software that groups like red hat have provided to the community. like what? RPM? big deal. i know there are lots of things that have been added under the hood but what can you show me on the face of linux? GNOME? come on its still not totally stable. KDE? so it looks pretty big deal. I still can't get my sound card to work and not because i don't know how to compile a kernel but because there are no drivers for it and i don't think there ever will be.

Ok now finally and i mean it this time. the kernel. Linus has done a superb job in creating linux. just flippin marvelous. the fact that he continues to do it sans pay is admirable. will the next guy? oh and when will it be that in order to upgrade my machine all i do is insert a disk and hit upgrade and not go through configure make, make install? how about that Red Hat how about making it that easy. and no no matter what you want to point to it still ain't point click easy. I really don't think we want it to be. if that were to happen then my mom could use it and god forbid that happens. bad enough we run into aol users on IRC now. heaven forfend we should find out they're runnin linux too. we say we want it but i really don't think that the majority of us do.

(I'm sleeping in my flame retardant underpants)

Corel

[jfunk]

Actually, I received my happy shrinkwrapped CorelDraw box on Monday.

I was really surprised how much the stability has increased since the last beta. It hasn't even crashed on me yet, and loads and operates really quick, especially considering it's a Wine app. It blows away StarOffice 5.2 in efficiency and stability.

It also works great with my Graphire and supports xcf files. It's quite impressive.

The 12" infaltable penguin is cool, too. It even comes with a repair kit...

Misrepresentative!

[Tor]

This confirms my suspicion that the way IDC collects its data is not very suitable for the brand GNU world of free software.

Debian's distribution model, for instance, does not favor physical media (CD-ROMs), but rather "subscription" of updates via the Internet. And according to several Slashdot polls, Debian has the second largest user base. (Granted, these are some of the most geeky users, but nevertheless it shows a point).

Old world mindsets (like IDC's measurement of sales) does not cope well with new realities. Too bad, their loss.

Re:So where's Debian?

[JamesGreenhalgh]

This one's easy - Redhat has had FAR more security alerts than Debian. Point that out to them. If they are the sort of people short-sighted enough to place faith in market share, then they're also short sighted enough not to realise that it's a poor argument ;-)

CNET number of Corel download high cause ...

[egghat]

it's there primary mirror ...

Which isn't the case for any other distro.

Market share and debian

[Derwen]

Anyway, the study is farcial because it counts sales, not installed systems. Thus, Debian doesn't get reported.

Hear, hear!

I'm in the middle of downloading 2.2 images for a couple of servers at work (yes I am using rsync to be kind to the iso mirrors :-)
It seems incredible that an article about distributions for servers could skip debian. Whilst the article did state that they were using IDC info, and that this didn't reflect pre-installed sales, it nowhere stated that most people download their distro.
How many people are running debian? - I don't know and IDC don't know, that's fair enough - but the article is very misleading to talk about market share, and then ignore half the market!
Just my 0.02
- Derwen

Red Hat

[willy everlearn]

As a hardcore follower of P Volkerding I would say this. The same killer app that has put RH on sooooo many desktops and made it soooo user friendly is RPM.

The reason I hate RH is RPM. You must do a post-install-mortem to find out where it put anything.

Give me tar-balls or give me DEATH!!!!!!!!

Live Streaming Slack the true distro!!!!!

willy

Related Links?

[frank249]

Why are there 3 identical links to RedHat under the related links sidebar and none for Corel There are links for Calders, SuSE and even Netscape which was not even mentioned in the article.

BTW: The Techevaluation.com site is pretty lame. If you go to their discussion forums pages(the ones with all the IBM ads) It just says that -Features and Site page will be up and available in the summer of 2000.

So where's Debian

[Karora]

I have been using Debian for the last few years and I rarely see them mentioned in this sort of article.

This makes me wonder if the statistics that articles such as this quote are really worth bothering with! It seems to me that unless you take statistics from debian.org and all it's mirrors that you won't be getting a true picture of the marketplace.

Debian is a significant force, and one which increasingly deserves recognition as we see other distributions based around it's excellent package management system.

I've been using Storm recently and find it an excellent way to get Debian installed, with all the power of Debian's management system available to me afterwards.

The Walnut Creek downloads of ISO images is particularly bogus in this regard - why download an ISO image of Debian? Grabbing a couple of floppies and doing a net install is much easier...

Mandrake

[zealot]

Hmmm... I remember reading reports before that Mandrake was by far the most used linux distribution, at least in the US. Too bad I can't find the links. I hate surveys.

Pfft

[Booker]

Red Hat made plenty of money pre-ipo, and now they are taking calculated losses to advertise and grow. They expect to be profitable again in the near future.

There is most certainly money to be made in Linux...

---

how about just one linux distro in the stores?

[Bad_CRC]

then they could put a linux program or two on the shelf.

right now there are quite a few stores where you can buy "linux" in a shiny box... Redhat, mandrake, suse... But there is not a single store where you could buy a linux game or application.

120,000 people in town, and not a single copy of linux quake on a retail shelf anywhere.

________

Re:how about just one linux distro in the stores?

[radja]

I was at my local large bookstore, and they carry several distro's (RH, SuSe, PPC, SlackWare and more if you count the books with free CD), and some linux games too (Civ:CtP, MythII). Some apps too... that's Scholtens Wristers in Groningen, NL.
They're renowned for having a very well-stocked computer-related section.

//rdj

Re:Good to see Corel Linux almost dead

[AntiBasic]

You lack any empirical evidence. Try not to be as ambiguous as you are.

Linux isn't IN the market

[epcraig]

Using Linux takes you off the market, until something breaks, or unless you succumb to the urge for the latest and greatest.

Meanwhile, you're invisible unless your Linux is a server on the Internet, where Netcraft can find you, nobody needs to know you use Linux.

So far I've seen no foolproof method for noticing Linux desktops. We know, but cannot prove, that there are more desktops out there in the business world than anybody sells on new boxes. Home and school users are even less findable, they tend to be castoff business machines, "obsolete", not even the hardware shows up in the market.

The report is using OUTDATED DATA

[gavriels]

The IDC report in question shows numbers from '98-'99. Corel Linux wasn't *RELEASED* until late '99. This is an utterly bogus report. How it became 'news' is beyond me.

Re:I want a solid Linux OS

[mindstrm]

Right.
And how is the fact that FreeBSD is neat related to a discussion of Linux marketshare?

Re:Corel support prospects to risky to bother

[frank249]

Stories of Corel's demise are greatly exagerated. While Q3 may show a loss it is because both Corel Draw 9 and WordPerfect office 2K are near the ends of their cycles. Corel Draw 9 is due out in Nov and from early reviews it will be a big hit. WP10 is also due out in early 2001. They also have plenty of assets left to draw on if required including 8% of Graphon and 25% of Rebel(IPO due shortly).

Re:I have a true Win2k disk

[AFCArchvile]

... but I still didn't pay for it. I won it at the Microsoft RoadShow, just for attending. Catch is, you have to work for a Microsoft Retailer, and I just so happen to work at the parts counter at CompUSA.

Now I get to spend the day saying to the morons, "No, you don't want Windows 2000, you want Windows ME which is coming out very shortly." Gotta guide those morons in the right direction.

TechEval Article uses _1999_ Data

[Cy Guy]

If Corel Linux is dying why is it in the top ten in the Computer Shopper Hot Products listing and ranking 385 in sales at Amazon?

Read the following paragraph from the TechEval article:

From 1998 to 1999, the Linux market overall grew by 89% (by units shipped), but Red Hat grew "only" 69%. This is in sharp contrast to the growth of SuSE (175%), Caldera (175%), and TurboLinux (450%).

I think the 1% figure they cite for Corel was their market share for an IDC survey conducted in 1999, after they had just released it. So it would be impossible to conclude the direction Corel was going from just the first survey they appeared on.

If I was Corel, I would be getting my lawyers on these guys right away. Hopefully with a press release indicating what their actually sales figures have been.

Clueless article

[dbandel]

I actually stuck it out to read the whole article (all 16 pages -- and my head hurts).

Looks to me like someone who was bored used different color darts to score each area. No discussion of how they arrived at any conclusions. No criteria that could be evaluated. Combine that with a lot of statements I found myself either laughing at (because there was no basis for the statement) or crying at (because it was FUD or just completely wrong).

Let's see: security and encryption: winner -- Win2K? (did they fire all the kindergarten cryptographers? -- don't think so). Scripting support: winner -- Win2K? Oh, that's right, Linux doesn't have VBA so you can write virii. (knew there was some reason Win2K won this one, since I've never been able to script much of anything in a Windows machine). RH needs to support base Linux development more (is this guy living under a ROCK?).

The list is too long. And I noticed there was a link to write the author (he's so proud of his work). NOT!

Well, my e-mail address is here (david@pananix.com) if the author cares to discuss/justify any of what he wrote. Frankly, RH6.2, COL2.4, Debian, Slackware, et. al., all look like Linux to me. And it all looks a heck of a lot better on my desktop than anything M$ could put there.

BTW, anyone check out WebTESS? Explorer 5.0 and above only need apply. (where do you get that for Linux?)

David A. Bandel

Re:Daikatana

[AFCArchvile]

I thought it would actually be a good single player experience. At first, I couldn't get past the first level due to the many bugs that DK had with Win2k. Once I downloaded the 44.5 MB patch (!) and played, it was actually ok, in godmode. Once I met up with Stuporfly, it went downhill. He just gets in the way, and I didn't want to find out what'd it be like hauling around two stooges. So I made my decision. I'm gonna cut up the disc, maybe cover it with cheese or other gunk, then mail it via registered mail directly to John Romero.

Before I do that, though, I'm gonna start a multiplayer game, rename myself to John Romero, then kill myself. The screenshot will say at the top: "John Romero failed at life." Boy, he sure has!

That's nice to see

[-martee]

More competition can only be a good thing for Linux users (and Windows users, when they eventually realize the error of their ways :-)

Martee

Good news? Bad news? Indifferent?

[barzok]

Ignoring the business and Wall Street-centric mindset, we're all playing for the same team here. RedHat market share dropping relative to other distros is a good thing IMO. More variety, more incentive for others to join in, rather than giving up saying "I can't compete with RH, why bother?"

Here's another uptime

[pwhysall]

OpenVMS V7.1-2 on node GUISA1 14-SEP-2000 12:40:55.15 Uptime 190 20:29:44

Had to reboot it 190 days ago, got a new processor...
--

Competition = Good.

[Dr. Dew]

Good. A little competitive pressure on RH might help motivate some improvements that others are including in their derivative distros.

All the same, I wish my company's products were doing as "poorly" in our market as Red Hat's are in theirs.

Although people still peddle the "Linux factions will kill the market" story, I want people to exploit the fact that there's more than one way to do things, and retain the understanding that as users, many of us have competing needs and desires.

It's a shame...Corel blew it by distributing their first release pre-broken (wrong kernel headers, etc.), and by focusing on bluster rather than code, but it has come closest to being my Linux distro Holy Grail: one I can give my dad on CD and not have to come over and help him install/configure.

BTW, did you notice the amusing "please don't flame us" disclaimer:
"(This does not imply that SuSE or TurboLinux are inferior - merely that they were not rated in the mentioned report.)"

No.

[brokeninside]

Does this count magazine distributions?

No.

Or at least I don't think so. Since the article continually spoke of 'numbers shipped,' its my educated guess that only retail sales are being counted. The article did specifically mention that preloads were not counted. In all liklihood, downloads, promotional disks (such as that in magazines), and discount sellers (ala cheap bytes and linux systems lab) were not included in the number.

I've installed Linux around ten to twelve times, only once have I purchased a retail box (Caldera OpenLinux 2.1) and its not the flavor of Linux I run on any of my machines (Storm 2000 2nd edition on my desktop, Debian Slink on my laptop). I sure wish there was some way to do a breakdown of numbers that included actual installs instead of retail box sales.

On the other hand, I think the article did raise a good point that only Linux companies with a decent number of retail sales will stay in business. Of course, balance that because the overall best distribution (in my lame opinion) is Debian which is compiled entirely by volunteers and as such is not dependant on marketshare for its survival.

That's my take,

-l

Distribution statistics

[hta]

This is from http://counter.li.org/reports/machines.html

distribution
============
79826 reported
80104 values
1588 1.99% DIY
13089 16.40% Debian
3440 4.31% Debian ==DEBIAN-VERSION==
4898 6.14% Mandrake
23666 29.65% Red Hat
6006 7.52% S.u.S.E
21657 27.13% Slackware
5760 7.22% Others

Unlike all the others, if you don't like the numbers, you can DO something about it. Go register!

Re:Farewell, OldHat, and good riddance

[Jenova]

Also, X refuses to go above 8-bit on hardware known to go higher (ATI Rage IIC)
-----------

That's strange. I have Redhat 6.2 and an ATI Rage IIc OEM card. No problems running 1024X784 @ 16bits colour.

Re:How meaningful is this?

[Master Bait]

Also, the survey ran from (unspecified) in 1998 to (unspecified) in 1999. Quite a while ago, eh? This accounts for the super low Corel sales.

blessings,

Started with RedHat, moved elsewhere

[evilned]

I have noticed a trend among many of my linux using friends and myself. Alot start with Redhat or mandrake, and then once they are comfortable with the whole linux experience they switch, Usually to debian or slackware or a BSD unix. I myself started with RedHat 4.2 and went till 5.2, and then switched to debian. My theory is that Redhat's easy install is a great selling point to the newbie, but then other considerations take precedent after the shock of learning a new OS has worn off. Maybe this study is just showing a maturing linux distro market. Of course with no slack or debian numbers, its kinda hard to prove my point.

Re:So where's Debian?

[jorbettis]

Since Debian is the free distro, it can't be bought, can it? Actually, according to netcraft (I can't find it on their site, but I know I saw it there), Debian is the Number 2 Distro in terms of total number of boxes running it.

Re:Oh well.

[AFCArchvile]

I'd ask for your /etc/XF86Config settings, but like I said, Linux is getting the hell off of that hard drive.

Caldera has been around almost as long as RH

[maynard]

Caldera released the Caldera Network Desktop 1.0 back in late '95 or early '96. It was expensive at $100.00 or so, but included a "simple" proprietary desktop (which sucked), a version of Accelerated X (this is what convinced RedHat to include another commercial X server, MetroLink X, with the commercial Redhat 4.0), and some backup tool which escapes my recolection.

Caldera has also contributed significantly to the Free Software movement, so even though they've been focused on the corporate customer since the early days, they've also contributed to the community; type dmesg and grep for Caldera.

It'll be interesting to see how much of SCO UNIX Caldera releases to the Free Software community. They claim that licensing restrictions on the code they've purchased in the SCO buyout limits their ability to release certain code. INAL, so I can't judge the issue beyond personal opinion... but I think they'd be well advised to release everything they can and explain in detail why they can't release anything else so that a third party can corroborate. This will settle the issue of community obligation, while also letting the community accept the rationale behind any withholding of source.

Note that I say this knowing full well that Caldera has no legal obligation to release any source purchased in the SCO deal, at all. No, this is community obligation. Just what OS have they been selling for the last five years? How much of that did they write? Look at Troll Tech; they've released FreeQT under the GPL. Can you think of anything else a company might do which at first threatens it's bottom line, but at second glance drives the product's succeess through ubiquity?

Look who's talking

[Hugonz]

You're a noname...he's Geccoman, I'm Hugonz and I run Slack

clap, clap, clap

Re:Look who's talking

[Kirkoff]

You're a noname...he's Geccoman, I'm Hugonz and I run Slack

And I'm Kirkoff, and I run slack.

Re:Can the open source model support such growth?

[Black Parrot]

Expanding market share causes a cluebie problem all right, but it's not a problem with cluebie users. No number of new users is going to slow down development, and the nice thing about software is that it doesn't take much longer to write an application for a billion users than it does for a thousand.

The cluebie problem I'm talking about is all the cluebie journalists who "need" to write an article about Linux but don't actually have anything to say... so they ask loudly and often whether the sky is falling. Such as the one over at linux.com right now.

--

Red Hat in Asia Pacific and Japan

[RobHart]

Please note that Red Hat does have significant presence in Asia-Pacific, with its Asia-Pacific HQ in Brisbane, Australia and offices in Singapore and Hong Kong. Red Hat also has a large office in Japan.

Official Red Hat Linux is already available in both Japanese and Korean btw.

Also, it is worth noting that the survey reported at http://www.redhat.com/about/2000/press_marketleade r.html shows that Red Hat has significant mindshare in markets it has yet to enter!

Corel = Cut out bins

[SomeOtherGuy]

I noticed that one can now find Corel in the Cut out bins at best buy...$9.99 (right next to 50000 tt fonts and clipart for the holidays).

Nothing wrong with a little competition!

[mholve]

That's good, right? :)

not a good measurement?

[gbroiles]

I think "market share" deserves more careful thought when applied to free software - the study would seem to describe "market share among people who purchased packaged distributions" which is pretty different from number of installations, which is what many people think "market share" means, or ought to mean.

Is Apache's "market share" of the webserver market 0%, because the Apache Software Foundation doesn't sell any copies? I don't think so.

The methodology used is great if you're trying to figure out who's making how much money from selling Linux distributions, but isn't so great if you're trying to figure out which distributions are good ones, or popular ones.

In particular, distributions which are easy to install via the Net and/or easy to install without documentation are much less likely to require the use of floppies, CD's, or installation manuals - so it may be that distributions which sell a lot are actually inferior, technically, but that inferiority drives sales.

I don't say that to pick on Red Hat - one of my boxes runs Red Hat, and I've been pretty happy with it, and don't know enough about the other contemporary distros to pick on them. I just think it's a shame to read more into these numbers than is reasonable.

Re:not a good measurement?

[Sheik Geek]

The methodology used is great if you're trying to figure out who's making how much money from selling Linux distributions, but isn't so great if you're trying to figure out which distributions are good ones, or popular ones. This article just goes to show that Red Hat is not Linux. There are many distro out there, each with their own pro's and con's. I am a big Caldera fan(1). The main thing I see from this article is which distro do businesses want to use, verses which distro do the geeks/nerds(2) want use. Obviously Japanesse business want Turbo Linux, IBM wants Caldera, Dell wants RedHat. The geeks well I would recommend the Linux from Scratch Distro.

(1)This is my personal opinion. Anybody can disagree if they wish(3).
(2)Geeks/nerds is used as a term of enderment in this case.
(3)They are coure will be wrong if they disagree ;)

Can the open source model support such growth?

[MonkeyHanger]

Although its a good sign that Linux is increasing its market share, the point must be raised about whether the open-source model of system production can cater for a massively increasing market. As greater amounts of less technically able users begin to adopt the OS, then this could cause problems in that too few Linux users will actually be contributing to the maintenence and upgrading of the OS itself. Quite simply, Linux has for a long time been a small market OS that has relied on its users contributing there spare time and energy to the actual specifics of the OS. If Linux becomes a popular OS can it really attract sufficent people to ensure the OS and its applications remain cutting edge?

So where's Debian?

[msnomer]

Was its market share too small to bother mentioning, or was it just not counted at all? Anyone have any idea (other than "IDC") where they got their numbers from?

--meredith

Dodgy statistics

[jdfox]

Your quoted Amazon link and ranking are actually for WP Office for Linux, not Corel Linux. Here's the correct link to Corel Linux OS, which shows it ranking not at 2,011, not 385.

You also wrote: "If Corel Linux is dying why is it in the top ten in the Computer Shopper Hot Products listing..."

Note the Hot Products listing states at the top: "This list shows the products viewed most often by computershopper.com visitors in the previous week. Click on a product name to get the latest prices and compare merchants. " (italics mine)

So this is merely measuring numbers of hits on product pages. It might indicate product interest, or it might indicate busy marketdroids hitting the pages from different IP addresses. It tells us little about product purchase, less still about deployment.

The retail stats that you quote from IDC and others are also unclear: does that represent the number of units shipped to retailers, or the number that were purchased by customers? Corel has used some unusual discounting to get large numbers of the boxes piled up in retail displays. This practice is sometimes known as "channel stuffing". It is very risky, and market analysts have been noticing it.

The CNet download stats quoted might be more impressive. It takes a lot of interest to download and burn a CD image. But do those number indicate the number of times the user got to Corel Linux's download "go" page on CNet, or completed FTP transfers? I meet a lot of people who attempt to download these images over a modem, give up, and wait for the cover disk to turn up on the magazines.

A more meaningful statistic for us to discuss would be a survey with proper methodology conducted by a market research group (perhaps by phone), taking in home users, corporate, university etc. and breaking the numbers down into relevant categories.

Re:Dodgy statistics

[frank249]

I linked to the WPO-L page as it also comes with CLOS. On your amazon link CLOS SE Delux is ranked 2000th since it only starts shipping today. Of note is that Corel products on Amazon all have 5 or 4 1/2 stars for customer ratings and WordPerfect Office Family Pack is ranked 19th top seller of all Amazon software sales. Ironic since many Microsoft products listed are top sellers yet have customer ratings of (MS Office 2K)2 1/2 stars.

This fits with PC Mag customers surveys that show that while more people use MS products they don't really like them that much while Corel users are mostly very satisfied.

Re:Dodgy statistics

[Sheik Geek]

Here is a list of the current major distros bases on Amazon.
Rad Hat 6.2 Standard (104)
Rad Hat 6.2 Professional(152)
Rad Hat 6.2 Deluxe (161)
Caldera Linux Technology Preview (196)
Mandrake 7.1 Deluxe (813)
Mandrake 7.1 (848)
Caldera eDesktop (1273)
Corel Linux (2011)
Caldera Open Linux 2.3 (2543)
Caldera eServer (2583)
Mandrake 7.0 Deluxe (3377)
Turbo Linux WorkStation (3377)

When you look at these stat they do not reflect the stat from the original article. We can maniplute stats ina thousand ways. Can make anything look better then anything else. It is called marketing.

To be fair you should post an update

[frank249]

The article also mentions that Corel is pretty much history."

How about adding an update to the story like;

The Technology evaluation article uses IDC data as of Dec 99. IDC data for Jul 2000 indicates that Linux-Mandrake is #1 in retail sales in US 31,5% with Red Hat #2 - 24,9% 3 - Corel: 23,0% and 4 - TurboLinux: 8,4%.

I don't know why you would post a story based on 9 month old data but an update would clarify the situation somewhat.

market proliferation

[Nanookanano]

I feel your comment is quite accurate, Stephan. Further, I salute the Red Hat company for moving Linux forward to compete with M$. The first rule in writing in the literary sense is to know your audience. While the 13372 might deride a 'softened' OS, us old greenscreeners remember how irritating and stilted the first Windoze was compaired to old MSDOS. So Red Hat is not perfect...look at its competition! Not other Linux OSs, M$WME! So, Red Hat is just a 'Model A'. At least it is mass produced and marketed.

Heh

[Th3 D0t]

Linux "Market" Share
---

The Why of RedHat

[Cephas Keken]

Simple, RedHat had all the right things in the right places at the right time. By having an easy
to install distribution they attracted people who
had heard the word linux and wanted to know more.
By having been around a little while they got people to be RedHat bigots, and anit-RedHat bigots. Those two groups of people are very important to market share in a FreeOS based market. People who hate your OS are more likely to talk about it than those who do. They also were
first (seemingly) to the spot of "most corperatized distribution" this made them safe for
business.

The best thing about RedHat's popularity is it keeps all the linuxoids distracted enough that
they don't come around messing with the OS's I love.
*8@)

Percent Increases are Meaningless Here...

[cowboy junkie]

Ummm, this seems kind of basic, but when Red Hat has a greater market share than the rest of the packages they chart combined, how can it possibly match their growth in a percentage? I can create my own distribution, install it on three machines and claim 300% growth, but that really doesn't mean anything...

I'd much rather see some hard numbers that might actually tell me something about how real this growth is...

How meaningful is this?

[Bun]

No Debian. No Slackware. No download figures/estimates taken into account.

It seems to me that when you're dealing with a freely downloadable product, basing market share estimates on retail sales is a little... narrow. Then again, if you're concerned with how much money the players are going to make, it's not a bad place to start...

Farewell, OldHat, and good riddance

[AFCArchvile]

What a pathetic excuse for a distribution. Version 6.2 (what I have and am soon replacing with Windows 2000) has nagging bugs, like segmentation faults while running, of all things, GNOME. Also, X refuses to go above 8-bit on hardware known to go higher (ATI Rage IIC).

What's even worse for OldHat, Linksys is bundling TurboLinux with some of its EEM-OS (Everything Except Mac OS) network cards

Time to dump those OldHat shares and go with a real distributor, not this profit driven geezer. (As I'm typing this, I'm cutting my OldHat 6.2 CD in half with a pair of wire cutters, the same thing that I'll soon do to Daikatana.