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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).""
I believe sales are down as people have learned that Linux can be downloaded...for free!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Microsoft is closed January 1st for new year's eve.
And the 2nd could be a weekend day.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
are they happy ?
At some point in time Nvidia was making one tenth of a percent of 3DFx... I don't see Nvidia doing too badly right now...
Just because Microsoft is making a lot of money, doesn't mean that this will always be true. Their business plan is fundamentally flawed... who in their right mind will rent software? And who in their right mind actually agrees with Microsoft's EULA? Right now they make way more money than Linux, but if Linux wasn't a product line that was profitable, then companies like IBM and Corel would not have put any energy into it...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
"On the second day of January, Microsoft had generated more operating system revenue than the Linux community (will for the entire year)."
Shouldn't it read? "On the second day of January, Microsoft had generated more bugs than the Linux community (will ever in their entire lives)."
Yep. They have nowhere to go but down. And we have nowhere to go but up.
Linux sales down, but the RIAA believes that piracy is the cause.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Of course Microsoft is (currently) winning the battle for dollars. You *have* to buy Microsoft products. You don't have to buy Linux.
A more interesting look would be to see how much money Microsoft is *losing* per year, because companies are replacing Windows with Linux.
The whole point of free (as in beer) software is that you don't *need* money to get it... I'd much rather see numbers pointing to actual in-use comparisons than money comparisons.
It amazes me that so many media people still don't get that you can't measure Linux's success in dollars and cents!
...analysts have been studying revenue generated by sales of air. Apparently total US sales of breathable air is close to zero. On the other hand annual revenue for Coca Cola is around $20bn. Clearly the importance of air has been overrated in recent years. In fact sales execs at Coca Cola have already been in discussion with publishers of biology textbooks in an attempt to replace unimportant chapters on respiration with new chapters on the metabolisation of Coca Cola products.
-- SIGFPE
> On the second day of January, Microsoft had generated more operating system revenue than the Linux community (will for the entire year).
The Microsoft crowd must have been too hung over on January 1st.
It's the very same thing as moby said recently, he questioned why the worth of music is measured by the amount of sales. I agree with him that the music that really matters and defines our culture is not the charts.
Same for the operating system, what is it worth for humanity and our social system? How much of our resources we would have needed to spent (to microsoft) if it wouldn't be there? What money would the companies miss that use linux?
And note again becase it's free does not mean it costs anybody a job or is evil. After all not a single job should be just a occupational therapy.
(thats where the anti GPL comments fail, or where the adversaries miss the global sight. A job should be good for something, if we can save the work then better leave it, and leave us all more freetime, spent the time on the beach, etc.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
I'm sure this article only applies to the 5% of Americans who are buying Manchicken Loonix for the first time to run on their desktop PC to feel awesome. The thought of just downloading the ISO never crossed their minds.
;-)
So in essence, this article really only applies to the mentally handicapped.
For all that the BSA would have you believe otherwise, the vast majority of computers running Microsoft operating systems are running paid-for licensed copies.
For all that Red Hat and others would hope, the vast majority of computers running Linux are running unpaid-for licensed copies.
Even if the same number of computers ran each operating system, the Microsoft operating system ``market'' would be much larger, as a result of simple math.
With this overwhelming inherent disadvantage, that Linux is even on the charts at all is impressive.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Compare that to Microsoft which gets revenue for every Intel box built by most of the major PC OEMS, plus every seat in a site licensed business, etc. etc. ad nauseum. In other words, Operating System Sales revenues are irrelevant as a measure of Linux success in the real world. The real question is: what percentages of new installs in the various business sectors (consumer, small business, enterprise) and segments (server, workstation, PDA, embedded) are more important and interesting statistics, are they not?
Isn't that the point of the "free OS" anyway?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
How did they assemble the information for the survey?
What kind of sales were included?
When it comes to Linux a lot of the sales do not derive from the sale of shrinkwrapped packages, but from consultancy services. Sometimes software is service, but these kind of surveys seldom acknowledge that. Sure, you do need help to install Microsoft Windows too, but in the Linux case the installment service might be the only cost associated with the installment, thus scewing the figures quit much.
Regards,
Mikael
Pawlo.com
It doesn't make any sense to compare the "revenues" of a priced product and a free product.
What next? A startling revelation that people all over America are paying for HBO and Cinemax, but many are getting local networks like NBC, ABC and Fox for FREE?
All your favorite sites in one place!
But you can't compare revenue generated by a FREE operating system with revenue generated by a rather costly operating system. The goals are completely different.
Linux, on the other hand, is either bought standalone or downloaded. Most folks download it. It's loaded on very few computers when they're sold, plus Linux is the minority OS in comparison.
Next thing they'll tell us is rainy weather is wetter than dry weather :P
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
Its not that Linux is free. Its more that the Microsoft flogging model of required and forced upgrades fails miserably in Linux. Anyone that successfully installs Linux and uses it for a short while will
A. Not need to upgrade in a long time.
B. Realize how to upgrade for free.
[political rant mode on]
"While experts still can assemble the required Linux components for free and create the same package that companies sell, customers will be leery of using that sort of customized software, Gillen said. "
I like how people feel no shame in telling what customers WILL do.
Reports like this are very usefull as an indication of what the news organization that reports them's position is. This tells me that news.com is a BigSoftware mouthpiece.
[/political rant mode on]
I can see thousand of posts claiming that Linux can be downloaded for free and hence sales figures doesn't matter.
But Linux was always available for free & all Linux users know that. This is not something which users found in 2001.
But, say 20% of the Linux users pay, then by co-relation, more often than not the number of users are also down. If Linux server sales were up, definitely you would have seen a revenue increase
Dan Kuznetsky, a Linux zealot, who is the VP of IDC software division, overcalculated Linux server unit figures for 2000 (at 27%) & his 2001 Linux figures came significantly low and having to eat humble pie since his Linux growth prediction didn't come true
He would lobby Congre$$ to implement a "no copy" flag on all PCs. Then anyone that wanted Linux would *have to* go and buy a boxed set! To summarize:
1. Lobby Congress to force PCs to not save Linux on the hard drive.
2.
3. Profit!
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
The good news is that sales are up, especially for "client" computers.
The real danger to Microsoft isn't Linux's ability to generate profits, the real danger is Linux's ability to commoditize software. Eventually Microsoft's customers are going to learn that they can get more for less.
...is an interesting way of looking at things, but I wouldn't put too much stock into it.
:-)
For instance, I guess most people say that in politics winning is everything. But quite a lot can be said about losing as well. In 2000 every single Libertarian candidate in my county lost, and most of them lost big--I think the max one got was 7% of the vote (now that I think about it, I was that candidate
However, one county comissioner's race, the clerk of courts race, the county treasurer's race, and I think a judgeship's race went unexpectedly for the democrats. Our LP candidates threw almost all of the county for the Democrats in spite of the fact that it's a strong Republican county. For a 3rd party candidate, there's actually a victory to be had in throwing a race. Next time you campaign, the candidates take you seriously, not to mention the people who won with "your help."
My point in saying that is, I'm sure that MS takes that 1% of their revenue lost very seriously, because I suspect that it matters quite a lot more to them than just 1% of their operations, in the same way that a Republican candidate who lost the election with 48% of the vote takes an LP'er who got less than 2% of the vote very seriously.
(ok...ok...it's an apples to mustard greens comparison, i'm just saying that there are lots of ways of looking at that data)
If Linux sales accounted for less than 1% of all OS sales, why is Netcraft reporting that over 50% of all webservers are running Apache on Linux?
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
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
How to rationalize theft.
All I want to know... Is do you like your OS? Anyhoo, on a more serious note, another good question is are the Linux companies happy? They are of comfortable size, and make a decent profit, and aren't anywhere near large enough to handle the kind of business MS gets.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
Afterall Linux is free. Only those who have a slow connection will go out and buy it and also people who are just a little lazy :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The economy is in the shitter. Sales for just about everything you can think of is down.
Why is this even considered news?
-- Will program for bandwidth
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Well hey at least they manage to make a profit with it, unlike our governments who steal plenty of us yet they barely break even.
.
.
ahh, the Micropoly
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Stupid "I think infinity is a number" computer scientists.
example.org - powered by Linux!
IDC declined to release the numbers of copies of Linux that were sold, but said the number stayed about level from 2000 to 2001. The number of copies that sold for "client" computers such as desktops and workstations, however, increased nearly 50 percent over 2000, in particular in Asia and Latin America, Gillen said.
Just because higher revenue comes from server sales doesn't mean it is "best suited" for servers. I think he's selling the desktop short, especially considering the huge growth of the desktop market this year (presumably from almost nothing to a little bit more than almost nothing, but none the less....)
holy cow what happened to Sun? I thought they were trading in the 10.00 something like that.
I'd like to see a "Wealth Generated per $100 In Sales" type of comparison - how much does it cost for each OS to generate $X worth of wealth for others. Not just hard $, but soft benefits as well. Does Microsoft and Windows actually grease the wheels of innovation by generating lots of $, or does Linux provide more benefits with the sharing of code and IP?
That would be actually rather interesting, from both social and business points of view. Not easy at all, but interesting.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
That $80 million in revenues for Linux probably generated about $200 million in revenues for Microsoft due to Microsoft's licensing tactics. As we all know, Microsoft's "campus" style licenses require you to pay a fee for every CPU whether it's running Windows or some other OS.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
That's right. Linux is free software. Sure, Redhat and others sell a boxed set in retail stores, and cheapbytes and others sell $5 CD's, but its available for free online for anyone with an internet connection. Of COURSE Microsoft will make more money than Linux will. The same could probably be said about a great many large software companies. Other factors need to be considered.
How many new installations of Linux were installed vs. the number of Windows installations?
Sure, Microsoft will probably still win, but the ratio will be a lot tighter.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I do. Or I make my employer du jour do so. I buy two or three a year. I usually buy anything other than Red Hat just to keep the manure spread as evenly as possible. And I've made it a point to buy one copy of Debian annually the last three years. I'm an athiest, this is what I do instead of tithing a church.
Go ahead, fertilize your favorite distro today.
illegitimii non ingravare
The Microsoft computer systems market, from a revenue perspective, accounts for one half of 1 percent of the total computer systems revenue each year, or roughly two days' worth of Apple's computer systems revenue," [IDC Analyst] Someone said.
"On the second day of January, Apple had generated more computer systems revenue than Microsoft (will for the entire year).""
what's even better news about that is that Apple is selling actual property in that figure.. not just intellectual property...
and that.. in the end... will make all the difference. because no matter how many laws they make - they can never hire enough cops or lawyers or judges to stop the spread of information and intellect.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
And, wha'? Why would RedHat stop distributing binaries? And how the heck would your fictional company get hold of the stuff, as purchased source code?
RedHat has been pretty careful to follow the letter and spirit of the GPL, and they remain openly committed to that model. Why would they try to subvert it now?
Commercial entities _already_ own and have a legal copyright for their GPL-derived code.
All RedHat has to do in order to make free copies more scarce is to stop maintaining an anonymous ftp server, and stop allowing updates to mirror sites. That is perfectly allowed under the GPL. Of course, they cannot stop anyone from buying the disc and redistributing the contents.
I bet those 10 million users are thinking, "You mean I could have gotten this for FREE?? Dammit!"
A Gardener study released yesterday suggests that bottled water manufacturers will have greater revenue by January 2 than all of the lakes, streams, and oceans in the world combined.
Another Gardener study has indicated that oxygen tank manufacturers will have more revenue by January 2 of next year than the (unnamed and unknown) purveyors of the free air that humans normally consume.
Gardener recommends that corporate executives switch to free water and air.
-- ken williams
Not only that, but I'd go so far as to say that between May 17 and May 19, Microsoft earned as much revenue as Linux did from June 3 to June 3 the following year. Think about it.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
then those who own copyright on their gpl producs include anti-dmca provisions in the GPL AND restrict redhat's use of their software so it can't be used.
Photos.
I've seen reports similar to this apples-and-oranges comparison (revenue from free software vs. proprietary) for the last couple of years, but the last figures I've been able to find that actually mean something (market share, or how many computers out there are actually running this or that OS) are for the year 2000.
That year, M$ server OSes had a 41% market share, with around 30% for Linux. It's interesting that no one has ever released the figures for 2001. Apparently IDC knows what those figures are, but won't say.
WHY DON'T ANY OF THESE SURVEY COMPANIES WANT TO TALK ABOUT MARKET SHARE??? Is it because M$ is going down the toilet and they're afraid it will start an investor panic if the word gets out? Is M$ PAYING them not to release the information? Is it just that nobody cares and no one wants to know?
I'm an inquiring mind, and I want to know....
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
As many have already pointed out, this is a useless piece of information. I work for a company that can only afford to do what it is doing because GNU/Linux exists. How does the revenue of my company get counted in this "revenue" figure? How many other companies are able to do more for less because they are starting to use GNU/Linux and Free/OpenBSD and Apache and on and on?
The revenue of companies that manufacture goods, while not insignificant, is less important than the network effects on the economy of infrastructure products like operating systems. These "second order" effects are often much greater than the first order revenue. Especially when we are talking about productivity tools (as opposed to pure consumer products like toothbrushes and deodorant).
an anonymous reader writes "News.com has a story about combined (legitamite) Windows downloads reaching 0 for 2001. "The Windows operating system market, from a download perspective, accounts for 0 percent of the total operating system downloads each year, or roughly no days' worth of Linux's operating system downloads," [IDC Analyst] Gillen said. "On the second day of January, Linux had generated more operating system downloads than the Windows community (will for the entire year).""
;)
So, your point was that more people buy Windows than Linux. Wow. Anyone could have figured that one out. Why not compare the number of Linux installations to the number of Windows installations? Wouldn't that be a more appropriate benchmark of Linux popularity? As for the commercial side of Linux, I don't think anyone claims to be as competative as Microsoft. Why aren't there meaningful co-relations (eg. 10% more Linux sales than last year)?
Oh well. I don't do things 'cause they are popular, so this means nothing to me.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
"The Linux operating system market, from a revenue perspective, accounts for one half of 1 percent of the total operating system revenue each year"
"On the second day of January, Microsoft had generated more operating system revenue than the Linux community (will for the entire year)."
You're kidding!
You mean that Linux, which is free, generates less revenue than a commercial OS, which costs money? Wow, how long did these guys spend figuring this one out?
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
I quess they used a rather tailored comb to come to that low $80 million :) Atleast it's easy to believe that finding the Linux revenues that are hidden inside business created by it in first place, inside embedded devices and inside a gazillion of developers heads who got their skills because of participating in getting Linux where it is now.
;))))))
I am not saying that Microsoft would not have hidden revenues
Worried? Why? $80 million is a lot more than it was in 1994. Plus, look at the dynamics of the market.
I think we all agree that desktop linux has failed (so far) to reach the masses. That means that all those cheaper, more powerful CPUs out there ship with Windows (with a nod to you Macheads). Meanwhile, lots of garage dot-coms (and Wall Street dot-coms too) have gone under, putting their nice Linux servers out on the market cheap.
What would really be interesting is to learn what the resale/auction numbers are for Linux-loaded machines for the past two years.
Will Linux ever take a serious portion of the desktop market? Perhaps Wal-Mart distribution will help, perhaps not. The real debate is whether the statistics in the article represent what's really going on in the market.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
How would you measure the importance of Linux on the desktop and get some kind of indication about progress?
. ht ml
m l?legacy=c net
Definitely not easy to get at the truth. There is the difficulty of getting accurate figures for new installs, and of finding out who has in fact upgraded an old licence. On top of this there is a lot of marketing FUD aimed at boosting the share of your favourite OS. Even the sales figures don't tell the whole story as competition from lower priced alternatives may hold back price increases out of all proportion to the revenue collected by Linuxes.
I collected a few articles which talk about it:
First off on the server side with IDC reported by Wired
http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,50311,00
"According to market research firm International Data Corp., Linux will account for 32 percent of server installations this year, up from 27 percent in 2001. Windows will jump from 41 percent in 2001 to 47 percent in 2002. Unix, on the other hand, is expected to drop from 14 percent of new installations in 2001 to 10 percent in 2002"
For the desktop you can look at statistics gathered from unique hits on popular web sites, although stats can lie
http://lowendmac.com/musings/01/1219.html
News.com has had other IDC stories recently
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-243527.ht
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-938700.html gives some different figures
"Breaking into the desktop market will be tough. Although Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft isn't dominant in servers, it has 94 percent of the market for operating systems that run on "clients" such as desktop and laptop computers. Linux claims only 3.8 percent of that market, said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky. "
And from the BSD corner "BSD Desktop Share Triples That of Linux"
http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/16382.html
.. because the income doesn't end up with Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake or any of the other big vendors.
How big of a percentage of Linux sales are preinstalled Linux made by consulting agencies that do not buy licenses from the big Linux-vendors? Impossible to say.. (For instance, selling Linux-servers preinstalled with Debian and doing maintnance on them.)
The Linuxmarket is totally different from the Windows-market. The income is NOT from packaged distros (which is measured here), but from maintnance, support, pre-installation, etc..
Gaute
It couldn't possibly be that Linux is FREE, could it? NAH!!!!!
I was waiting for someone to chime in with that vapid remark about how people will always manage to find business models to sell new technology (e.g. look at radio -- no one thought that would ever make money, but then people started selling ads.)... but it looks like no one will.
I loved this quote from the article:
Linux sales lost some ground to Windows last year, but they're expected to climb in coming years as distributors of the alternative operating system create new revenue streams.
What new revenue streams do they have in mind -- the money fairy? So far, the only thing they've been good at selling is stock. I am very suspicious of the idea that Linux will ever produce significant revenues.
One of the trends we are seeing these days, due to computer analysis of trends, is that the trends are no longer valid. Look at all the stock market analyists who were predicting a U-shaped recovery or a V-shaped recovery based on analyses of previous recessions. They were all full of crap. They told people to stay in the market, since the market would inevitably recover, and consequently the market now obeys a meta-law.
The people who think that technology will create revenues through some business model or another, no matter how you produce it, are basing their conclusions on recent history. But history is fallable because it filters out all the failures. Historically, commercial success did not arise out of an "if you build it, they will come" attitude; it came from people with an idea for making money, and those people were proven right or wrong.
It doesn't take a genius to see that the stock market's whole boom and bust arose out of this shared hallucination that all we had to do was build the Internet, and new business models would spring out of thin air.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Someone has already done this. Go to cheapbytes.com and look for "Pink Tie".
Anyone notice what the report said about increasing Linux desktop use in the Asia region. MS should be scared as shit about this.
Reviewing MS earnings by region leads to one solid conclusion: in the past 3 years MS has only managed to achieve any growth in the Americas region.
MS has recorded ZERO APPRECIABLE GROWTH in income in the Europe/Middle East/Asia in the past 3 years. Their Asia earnings have been stuck around 700 million per quarter, and their EU/Middle East earnings between 1.2 and 1.4 billion.
The writing is clearly on the wall for MS. Its game over from a global perspective for this company. China and Taiwan's investment in Linux and the countries like Norway and Germany edging away from MS paint a sour picture for Microsoft.
And, wha'? Why would RedHat stop distributing binaries?
AFAIK, RedHat has stopped making binaries available for free download. Wasn't there a
And how the heck would your fictional company get hold of the stuff, as purchased source code?
They would build their own binaries from the GPL'ed source.
RedHat has been pretty careful to follow the letter and spirit of the GPL, and they remain openly committed to that model. Why would they try to subvert it now?
The board of directors gets fed up with the cash burn and hires new management. Betrayed trust is only a management change away.
All RedHat has to do in order to make free copies more scarce is to stop maintaining an anonymous ftp server, and stop allowing updates to mirror sites. That is perfectly allowed under the GPL. Of course, they cannot stop anyone from buying the disc and redistributing the contents.
Which is exactly what OrangeFedora would do.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
their goal was to use cheap software to reduce the size of the market while maintaining their absolute market position, thus increasing their relative market share
That's hilarious. Is a $50M company in a market that's worth $2B (and shrinking) somehow better than the same size company in a market worth $10B (and growing)? Instead of increasing their own revenue, their plan is to shrink everyone else's revenue!? Do please explain to us how that would increase stockholder value.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
No... that proves the statement
/..
Lim 26,000,000/X=infinity
(X -> 0+)
(For those who can't make sense of that, it's saying that as the value of X approaches zero from the positive direction (decreases to zero), the value of 26,000,000/X approaches infinity.)
However, 26,000,000/0 is still undefined. For those graphing along at home, that means you use an empty circle as opposed to a filled-in dot.
This has been another presentation of more pre-calc than any of us really care to know.
P.S. Please forgive the sloppy notation. It's a little difficult to do the necessary sub and superscripts on
In Soviet Russia, Beowulf cluster imagines you!
There may be more money in Air than you think. Also, look at sales of Scuba gear. I imagine there was also sales to fire departments and ambulance units. It may well be that "sales of breathable air" were over $1 million, though I have no idea of knowing.
This doesn't include the other aspects of the air industry such as bicycle pumps and other assorted compressors. There seems to be a fair amount of industry dedicated to building products around using "breathable air" and packaging it so that it is more convenient or so it can be used where air is traditionally not available. Also, there are billions of dollars spent each year to detect air quality and see if it is "breathable," as well as filters to make air cleaner.
Now, it may seem like I am grasping at straws. However, I think the example of air provides a rather interesting case of market economics. I see many similarities between the markets built around air and Linux. You don't make the money on linux, just like you don't make money on air. You make money cleaning it up, packaging it, but most of all, using it. How many buinesses would survive without using air? None. Hopefully, we can make the value proposition such that the same will be said of Linux.
The money IBM saves by selling their servers without Microsoft code, or having to code their own operating systems totally from scratch?
I think as long as IBM is around Linux (At least on the server) will be alive and fine, doesn't matter how much FUD people throw at it.
~ kjrose
And note again becase it's free does not mean it costs anybody a job or is evil. After all not a single job should be just a occupational therapy.
Umm, are you implying that OS developers don't deserve jobs? What should they do in order to feed, shelter, and clothe their families?
What is worthy of being paid to do? Should everyone in the software industry become sysadmins, and write code in their spare time? As if we didn't spend too much time already in front of a computer screen! Why is making a living in the service sector somehow more noble?
If I were actually to "buy" (as in purchase, lay down cash for) Linux -- then I would be cutting into the bottom line of cost savings that were part of my cost action plan that was key in getting Linux in the door in the first place. Yes sir -- as I stair down at the endless racks of Linux boxen in this cool data center on a warm summers day....If I had incurred a "license" cost for each cpu -- then it would have been a harder sale....But since no (software purchase orders) were needed and these things are as stable as a 200 year old oak tree, I think we can call this a success, right?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
There seems to be a myth that money doesn't matter to the development of Linux. On the contrary, the distros actually do quite a bit of bug-fixing and programming. The less money they have, the less will be spent on it. More money and more revenues mean faster growth and more options. So, a loss of revenue is a bad thing for Linux.
Linux right now is in a growth phase. Regardless of the amount of revenue recieved, the number of computers running Linux has increased in the last year. Significant progress has been made on the desktop with KDE and Gnome. Programs such as OpenOffice and Mozilla have helped take up the application slack. Further, things like Code-Weaver and Ogg have helped advance the usability of Linux on the desktop and open source in general. It goes without saying that Linux has a significant server/high performance presence.
I think that there are less shrink-wrapped linux distros being purchased. It takes marketing money to put packages on retail shelves, and with the loss of funding most Linux providers don't want to do that. Caldera, Corel, and Red Hat all seem to have left the retail market. Still, I think more revenue is being generated by the overall Linux market than the story says.
Would it not be worthwhile comparing the sales of linux to the sales of cd burners and broadband internet access? They seem related to me.
No, not active server pages....ASP in business lingo stands for Average Selling Price. The ASP for a microsoft product is somewhere in the $200.00 range (excluding server products). What is the ASP for Linux products?....i'd guess somewhere near zero.
-ted
Linux total sales == 1% Total OS sales
Linux sales == 2 days MS OS sales
2 days MS OS sales == 1% Total OS sales
365 days MS OS sales == 182,5% total sales
note that other OS vendors (specially unix ones) has
some participation. (less quantity, more expensive OSes).
This can only mean that there are some people paying
the costumers to get there OS to generate -82,5% of total
sales.
Linux is not a product. It is a complex system that makes computer hardware work properly. It exists mainly because of it's natural environment. Linux coders want to mainly make thing work right for themselves. They share it with others because they are not in the business of creating OS's.
Check salary survey results on dice and see how much more money Unix professionals make compared to Windows professionals.
Measures that would be nice to see are measures on the line of return on investment using Linux or FreeBSD compared to Windows.
I'm mainly confused because I am still downloading iso images from RedHat, as late as last week. Maybe one of their admins didn't get the memo.
MS is indeed afraid of Linux. You see, with other competitors they can just squeeze their profits dry and kill them off. With Linux it's not so easy, because money and profit doesn't matter here. That is one less lethal weapon that they've got. In fact it's probably one of the major reasons Netscape crashed.
So go ahead MS, keep trying. Linux ain't dying buddy.
eTrade SUCKS
Ok, I've heard everybody mention the fact that Linux is free and that is why the numbers are low. I've heard others rebut the fact that not everybody sees Linux as free because it costs money in your average retail store. However...
1. I would dare to say the majority of Linux installs is of free ISOs (sorry, no evidence), which would still affect the low sales figure dramatically.
2. For those who use dialup and wish to purchase Linux, most distributions can be found for $5 or less, also contributing to low sales figures.
Also, do we know what "linux sales down" means? Does it mean retail purchases or anytime someone shells out money for Linux? What about expensive systems where a vendor version of Linux is included?
For example, if I buy a Sun Cobalt RAQ server right now, I get a nice server with Cobalt Linux installed on it. Sun has sold me the system and included a version of Linux with the sale of the system. Did the study give a dollar value to the Linux OS that was sold with my server in this case? I doubt it. There are a helluva lot of web hosting providers that use RAQs.
What about embedded devices?
Sounds like the spirit of GNU remains. RedHat (and other distributors) do have a copyright on their CD setup. You can do whatever you want with the software. I just don't see this weird paranoid DMCA scenario the original post describes.
>wrong. 26,000,000 / 2 = 13,000,000 26,000,000 / 1 = 26,000,000 26,000,000 / .1 = 260,000,000 26,000,000 / .001 = 2,600,000,000 See a trend yet? 26,000,000 / 0 = infinity
But 26,000,000 / -2 = -13,000,000 26,000,000 / -1 = -26,000,000 26,000,000 / -0.1 = -260,000,000 26,000,000 / -0.001 = -2,600,000,000 See a trend yet? 26,000,000 / 0 = -infinity.
Since -infinity != infinity, the result is undefined... (But all this assumes that infinity can be manipulated using real arithmetic. It can't. Infinity is outside the set of real numbers -- it is therefore undefined (in the reals))
Yes, complex infinity exists. But I am not versed in Reimannian geometry.
Mathworld explains such things better than most slashdotters
Okay, sorry. I did a search and i turns out it was UnitedLinux who announced that they would not be providing free binaries. Anyway, in my hypothetical example, the first step was for RedHat to stop providing free binaries. Since UnitedLinux has already done this, it is not inconceivable that RedHat will follow suit.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
On the second day of January, Linux had generated more Love and Community Spirt than the Microsoft Corporation (will for the entire year).""
Who cares if UnitedLinux will stop providing binaries?
You only need the binaries if you want to install a commercial software package that "works best" and is supported on those binaries. So in that case you ante up the 50 bucks for the binary distro.
However, there will binary knockoffs of UnitedLinux based distros that contain the same exact software compiled on a different machine using the UnitedLinux source.
So, Linux companies have to rely on a different source of income, like for example, service and consultancy. That's hardly news.
The figures can also be interpreted this way: Since Linux is usually installed once (or multiple times, let's say, one CD purchase) and then updated regularly (patched, whatever), there is no need to buy a new version. You can't upgrade MS systems (I am talking about major version updates, as in Win98->XP, not Service Packs, which sometimes are more of an annoyance pack then anything else, but that's a different story...) incrementally for free. An update from, say 98 to XP is in comparison counted as sales.
With Linux there is often no reason to update the whole distro, just update the kernel, binutils, modutils and whatever you fancy. All this stuff would rightfully never be counted as sales since (I guess) few people would buy the CDs to merely get a new kernel. It's small enough to download even with a 56K modem in a reasonable amount of time.
So yes, that was yet another useless article which showed exactly nothing. It's like saying Pete Sampras scored no points in the NBA last season. This is also true, but proves nothing. He didn't even try, or maybe he did but realized that he wouldn't be able to pay his bills playing basketball. That's why he is still playing tennis for a living.
I feel so sig.
you have to run Xconfigurator, right? (at least you did when redhat 6.1 was around
Fast forward three years to graphical apps that do the same thing. They add video modes to your X server's config file, and then they tell you which keys to press to change resolutions while the X server is running.
They want a nice little graphical installer, not ./configure, make, make install.
If you want to submit a patch to make GNU Autoconf create a graphical installer for applications that encapsulates ./configure, make, su, make install into a wizard, go right ahead. You'd be doing users of Linux OS[1] a favor.
[1] "Linux kernel" refers to the monolithic kernel developed by Linus Torvalds. "Linux OS" refers to all Linux distributions. "GNU/Linux" refers to Linux distributions that provide a version composed entirely or almost entirely of free software.
Will I retire or break 10K?
On the desktop, though, I'm not sure of what
needs to be done to make things profitable.
Why do things need to be made profitable?
Does anyone else have any other ideas of how
Linux software vendors could develop good
software, make money, and stay true to their
ideals?
We are developing good software and staying true to our ideals. Making money as well would be nice, but why is it necessary?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The internet was meant to be free you troll
That's a patently false joke. The internet was meant to be a massively distributed fail-safe way to transfer research information, so that in the advent of a nuclear war, the remaining research institutions could collaborate with each other (and develop tech to 'win the war'). Distributing porn probably ranked second on the list.
The internet was originally DARPAnet - A U.S. military research network. It linked universities whose research was funded by the military.
The internet was meant to research warfare and weapons. Being 'free' had nothing to do with it.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
I've been using Linux exclusively on my home PC's since 1996. Until this year, I've taken the "well I can download the ISO for free, why pay?" approach. While this is certainly true, I've decided I want to support the community and companies that have supported my in my computer hobby. It isn't very expensive to BUY a copy of your favorite Linux distro, so why not do it? You will be benefiting our community and the open source projects we so enjoy, as well as benefiting the companies that are seen as "enemies" by the MPAA, RIAA, Microsoft. It's a win-win situation. The /. crowd are the "uber-geeks" of this open source revolution, lets do our part to help it along.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
But since it is Unis and the military who were conected, it meant students and military people got free beer net. So while someone (the govt) paid for it, still it had a tradition of free beer and free speech, and indeed was built om technology which was both free as in soeech and as in beer.
Great. Let's get that down to zero. That would mean that Linux is so easy to install that people won't have to pay money to anybody anymore.
What you're describing is Instant Run-off Voting (IRV). IRV has serious problems [electionmethods.org], the most serious of which being that in many cases, listing your favoured candidate first hurts his chances of winning.
Well, then, do what they did in France and have a single run-off. On the first pass, pick the two candidates with the greatest numbers of #1 votes, and then eliminate all of the other candidates. Then, in the run-off, go through each ballot and assign it to the candidate that it ranks the highest. This method has an advantage of being simple and understandable by everyone, unlike the Condorcet method. A single run-off basically what we have now, except that you don't throw your vote away on a candidate who doesn't make the initial cut.
Umm, are you implying that OS developers don't deserve jobs? What should they do in order to feed, shelter, and clothe their families?
No, of course they deserve, as long they do something that helps others, and they want to pay for it. However I don't see how something can be anti-business if it offers something for free others want to get paid for. Or how sharing code is anti-competative. After all the worth of computing is how much energy our social community put into it, and how much we get out. If there is a way to put less into it to get out equal it's better for all of us. However cutting down something thats cheaper just so _I_ can get money for it is hurting the social community, everbody (but me).
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Consider the "value" you get when buying Windows or a Linux distro. Now consider all the money the vendors/distributors make and how much "value" they provide / are able to produce with that money.
If we assume for a moment that the "value" you get from Windows or Linux is roughly equal, but producing that value for Windows takes 200 times as much money, can we conclude that in the overall production circle, Windows' price/performance ratio sucks big time?
In other words, after raking in so much money, you'd expect the Microsofties to deliver more "value" than that.
If you look at it from an economic or business model point of view (which should be the analysts job, no?), under the Microsoft business model it costs 200 times as much to produce something of the same value. So I say it's about time analysts devalued MS, since they are 200 times less efficient than the Linux distro vendors (who manage to produce the same output for less).
I realize that the math is slightly flawed, since there are some hidden development costs in Linux that do not enter this calculation. But the basic argument still holds true.
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
It comes with emacs too!
Sorry, that was low. I'll go hang my head in shame now.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Computers in general are ment to be an assist to productivity, not an industry to become master over all others.
That Ring is going to be melted down from wence it came. Microsoft is going to be put out of business, at least in the sence of the monopoly they have and continiously pursue, in defiance of court findings. They will be made equal in revenues vs. value output as comparied to other companies.
To compare MS revenues to that of Linux, is if anything, a measure of such monopolistic control. There are other companies in the world that are much larger, employ a great deal more people and generate far more value than MS.
Not having the high profit margin as MS currently has only means they are not employing monopolistic practices to the extent that MS has been.
GNU/Linux is on the opposite end on the monopoly spectrum, the fact that it is making money at all is a very strong statement and testiment to it's strength and ability to compete even when it is free as a product.
It is known that MS has often caused consumer support for it's products to be shifted to OEMs like Gateway who have to incure the expense of such support, rather than MS doing it.
With Linux, there is no shifting of support in order to increase revenues or profit margins. A company producing a distribution also provides the support, perhaps it is even where they make money, in selling greater support for a product they package and customize.
Another way of looking at the lessor revenues Linux directly generates as comparied to MS products, is to consider how much the customer base is saving or otherwise has to spend on other things like hardware or even non-computer related items! This of course is something to consider as to how money flows thru the economy and what values it generates in doing so. Rather than so much money being focused thru a controlling point such as MS, the overall free market is bound to do better.
And who are the customer of GNU/Linux? Many ISPs, a very large part of the internet...... Think about how much more an internet acount might cost you, if Free Software or such, was not being used. How about the adoption and increasing adoption of Free and Open Source Software by governments? How much more would you be paying in taxes, if it wern't for Free and Open Sourse Software?
If anything, the articles talking about how much more revenues MS has then Linux only shows how abusive MS is being in the economy, and/or how supportive GNU/Linux is of a Free and Open MARKET, as is intended of a Free Enterprise capitalistic and competing Price/Product market.
Having Linux as a comparison base...... well every equasion has 2 tatements it makes.... Here, the other statement is simple about how abusive MS is in trying to control the economy or large part of it. And there are economic reasons why we have laws against such.....understand what those valid reasons are....
Writing articles that bluntly ignore the purpose of free enterprise of competitive markets while making it sound like such ignorance of the basics is a good thing for the market..........is highly deceptive and a promotion of ignorance is bliss. Only they are not telling you it's not your bliss, just your ignorance to support someone elses bliss.
So get a fu&in clue and pass the word about this revenue indicator and what it really means. And oh so how inline it is with the corporate value scams and stock market manipulations going on today.
But the rest of the example; I still do not get it. If the source code is under the GPL, then the copyright holder cannot, under the terms of the license, stop anyone from modifying and re-releasing it in source or binary form.
All RedHat can do is tell me not to use the RedHat name on it.
And, as for free binaries, who cares? Free binaries are not a requirement of the GPL, however, source-on-demand for low cost (like the cost of media) is a requirement, and the distributor is not allowed to restrict further distribution.
In your example, OF has removed the embedded RedHat strings from the source code, right? So officially it is now a product derived from GPL source code and falls under the GPL.
While your example is limited in scope, I fail to see the logic from one step to the next, and I see no way that this could lead to the legal nullification of the GPL, without also leading to the nullification of software licenses as they exist.
The point is, in the future, Linux distributors will become more concerned with making a buck, after it becomes apparent that no one is just going to drop money in their hands. As is mentioned in the article, Linux distributors are projecting "increased sales" through "new revenue streams" and one of these revenue streams is "making it more difficult for users to obtain the software for free."
My theory is that RedHat will try to prevent people from simply copying their distribution and rebranding it. This could be the string "RedHat" embedded in non-obvious places or it might include some proprietary apps or some obfuscated code that needs to be modified. If OF isn't careful, RedHat will accuse them of copyright/trademark violation or reverse engineering and take them to court.
At that point, assuming that the proprietary software industry is already bleeding and the free software companies aren't making any money either, I speculated that the government might step in and try to save the industry. They might do this by pressuring the courts to rule that some sections of the GPL are unenforceable.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
P.S. It (sort of) says in the article that RedHat is not providing binaries to Advanced Server, although I guess they are still providing binaries for their desktop Linux.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Printf("%s%s%s\n", "Re", "dH", "at");
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Yes, I understand your 'theory,' but to make my point as clearly as possible: the GPL says that nobody is allowed to do what you have described.
So, you say that the US gov't will (somehow) pressure the courts into nullifying some or all of the GPL (by appointing anti-GPL judges to the Federal Courts???), but why would anyone do this to 'save' the software industry?
Except for the BSD license and public domain, the GPL is the least restrictive software license in use today. If it is found to be unenforceable, EVERY vendor of software (including RedHat in your example) is screwed, as they are releasing software under licenses that are MORE restrictive than the one which has been found to be unenforceable. Read the licenses with other software, and you will see the types of restrictions that copyright holders feel they can impose on users and developers.
I really do understand the mechanics of what you are describing, but from both a legal and business point of view, it makes absolutely no sense. When RedHat appoints a suicidal maniac as their CEO, or when Brett Glass becomes Speaker of the House, what you describe might come to pass, but until then, I think that closing down the ftp server and raising the price of CD's would be an easier way to make some money without trying to outlaw restrictions on software use and copying.
Closing down the ftp server doesn't help if OF has its own download site. Another poster already pointed out that there is already a site where you can download "Pink Tie" Linux, which is just RedHat under annother name.
/. threads, I believe that they really do care about keeping American businesses healthy (remember that the dot.com bubble was enough to send the entire American economy into recession).
After a couple more years of losing money, I think it is quite realistic that RedHat (or their shareholders) will turn anti-GPL. As corrupt as the American government is always portrayed in these
Software EULAs are truly ridiculous when you read them, but most people accept that as standard legal mumbo-jumbo, which it really is. Have you read the EULA on the back of a ski pass, for example? It says they are not liable if the chairlift malfunctions, even due to human error, and you get killed. The point is, that would never hold up in court!! And I can't absolve myself of liability if I hold up a sign which says "We will not be held responsible for murdering you" right before I shoot someone in the head.
To a politician, I imagine that a restriction in an EULA that looks like a Communist plot is going to appear far more dangerous than one that says you can't "hack" the product. The government could very well decide that the GPL is "anti-competive" and pass legislation converting all GPL'ed products into BSD'ed ones (at least within American jurisdiction). They might very well do this, while leaving all other proprietary licenses alone.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Why in the world would I want my software vendor to have high revenues? The reason that Linux vendors have lower profit margins is because there is nothing to stop you from switching vendors if they gouge you. Linux is all about lowering the TCO of the solution, and a big chunk of that lower TCO comes from getting Microsoft's hand out of your pocket. More and more customers are realizing this and eventually Microsoft is going to have no choice but to try and compete with the lower prices.
But since it is Unis and the military who were conected, it meant students and military people got free beer net.
You make it sound like there were other ways to access the internet. There WAS NO 'internet' in 1969. The military ARPANET WAS IT. Service(wo)men didn't have access, nor did students. It was years later that either were granted access to use ARPANET at all. (For that matter, it was decades later that either had any real access to computers; even then they were restricted to VT-100 and other 'dummy' terminals.)
It consisted of newsgroups, e-mail and FTP. There were different, conflicting methods of addressing email and other name resolution. The modern versions of these standards came not from cooperation, but from one method becoming the 'defacto' standard because of its popularity.
It's easily arguable that the only reason the tech was 'free' is because software didn't qualify for copyrights and patents at the time.
The first newsgroups were moderated and censored before anything could be passed on. It was a military network, and subject to military rules and security. Only individuals (nearly always scientists and engineers) with security clearance were permitted to use it at first. It allowed "Manhattan Project" like collaboration in a decentralized form; no single bomb could kill all of the country's best scientists at once. It allowed a higher level of dissemenation for 'sensitive' information that normally would have been classified and distributed on a "need to know" basis.
It wasn't until much later that the military released control, and the internet became 'free'. There was no 'Web', no HTTP-- It wasn't until '83 that telnet began. All servers had to be approved by the US military.
still it had a tradition of free beer and free speech
There's a significant difference between "a tradition of freedom", and being guaranteed it. If you give a slave "a tradition of freedom" s/he's still a slave-- their freedom is not secure, and can be revoked at any time. Such was the case with DARPAnet. The free speech didn't exist until years after the network existed. The "Free Beer" (in the form of software) existed because non-free software (and espescially software patents) were either completely or nearly non-existent.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
But seriously, you keep repeating the same scenario over and over without a scrap of evidence or precedent to back it up, other than the fact that you can "see it happening someday."
You want evidence of my speculation? Hold on -- let me call Miss Cleo...
But seriously, you want precedent for my remarks:
Do you doubt that there is a Pink Tie Linux?
You don't believe that companies change their business model/attitude towards their customers after revenue dries up/a management change? Like UnitedLinux not offering binaries. Like Yahoo selling your address to spammers. Like Sun charging money for StarOffice.
You don't think that politicians care about the health of the software business?
You do think that politicians give a flying fuck about your right to hack the source code?
Like, which is it?
-a
How to rationalize theft.