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.....

Bad Link

[sulli]

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

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)

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.

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.

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.