Timeline Chart or Graph of GNU/Linux Adoption?

DNAman asks: "I'm preparing a presentation for the use of GNU/Linux in the biological sciences. One recurring comment that comes up is 'Linux is not mainstream, why should we be interested in it?' While we could debate the definition of mainstream, I think it would be more productive to illustrate the trend in use / adoption of GNU/Linux as a platform. Do any of you have decent data sources for this type of trend?"

Comments

Linux is not mainstream.

[asterism]

Linux is not the most popular operating system in the world, why should we be interested.

Science is not the most popular way of looking at the world, why should we be interested.

I'm not sure that numbers are what you need.

Easy.

[Feztaa]

Scientists should be interested in linux because linux is developed in much the same way that scientific theories are developed.

That is, nobody will ever respect a theory untill it has undergone peer review. Other scientists scrutinize the theory, and try to disprove it. If they fail to disprove it, then it becomes accepted as the best theory.

In Linux, it's much the same. Somebody writes a program, and in doing so, claims that their program is the best way to solve that given problem. Other programmers will scrutinize the code, and try to find better ways of solving the problem. They can develop entirely new ways that replace the old ways, or they can incrementally improve the current ways. Either way, the end result is a higher quality of code, in a general sense.

I mean, Linux Just Makes Sense (TM) for the scientific community. They both heavily rely on peer review to ensure that things are reliable and trustworthy.

Would anybody trust a scientific theory that was developed by secretive scientists who won't publish what experiments they did to come up with their ideas? If we can't verify that what they did was the right way to do things, how can we trust their results? Of course you don't, which is the same reason that proprietary software is so crappy. You can't see their methods, only their results, and the results are often sub-par.

an answer...

[kevin lyda]

ok, while morons babble about whether you should ask your question or not, i'll actually point you at an answer:

http://counter.li.org/

"linux usage" is hard to gauge. there's no central licensing authority (despite a certain moronic company's attempt). of course that argument is rather silly as closed software companies have to guess at their user base. for instance i count as 2 solaris users and around 10 windows users if you go by licenses purchased but i don't use either of those os's.