Linux Sales Down, But...

An anonymous reader writes " News.com has a story about combined Linux revenues reaching $80 million for 2001. "The Linux operating system market, from a revenue perspective, accounts for one half of 1 percent of the total operating system revenue each year, or roughly two days' worth of Microsoft's operating system revenue," [IDC Analyst] Gillen said. "On the second day of January, Microsoft had generated more operating system revenue than the Linux community (will for the entire year).""

Comments

Re:More... hmm...

[ceejayoz]

No, 'cause that'd be false. A more accurate statement would be "On the second day of January, the Linux community had patched the bugs that Microsoft won't have patched until NEXT January."

Re:Not for free anymore?

[God! Awful]

IDC based its projection of $280 million in sales within four years on efforts by Red Hat, SuSE and others to wring more money from Linux, in part by making it more difficult for users to obtain the software for free, Gillen said.

Here's what I think will happen:

1. RedHat stops distributing binaries and enforces its copyright on the binaries it builds.
2. Someone founds a company called OrangeFedora whose sole purpose is to take the RedHat distribution, s/RedHat/OrangeFedora/ and give away/sell the binaries at a reduced cost.
3. RedHat embeds some secret instances of the string "RedHat" inside their distro.
4a. OrangeFedora developers don't notice the secret strings.
5a. RedHat sues OrangeFedora for trademark violation and wins.
4b. OrangeFedora developers notice the secret strings and remove them.
5b. RedHat sues OrangeFedora under the DMCA and wins.
6. The courts decide that commercial entities have the right to keep ownership of their improvements to GPL'ed code, thus defeating the spirit of the license.

-a