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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.
Linux sales down, but the RIAA believes that piracy is the cause.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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
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!
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]
'On the second day of January, Microsoft had sucked more money out of their customers than the Linux community will for the entire year'.
Is an alternate way of looking at it. Which the customers appreciate.
Seriously tho, RedHat and company knows that they will never ever make anywhere close to what Microsoft has made selling software. But the idea is to make computing cheaper and freer, not to suck customers dry and invent new exciting buisness 'methods'.
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).