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Linux Market: Absolutes / Percentages / Trends
vincecate writes "In their 10-K filing, Microsoft says that
Linux server units
rose slightly faster on an absolute basis
than Windows server units in fiscal 2004.
To project the trends it is helpful to
look at the percentages.
Some
Gartner Inc. statistics
report Linux server unit shipments are up 61% giving it 9.5% of the overall market share.
Windows has a much larger base, so it can get
the same absolute unit growth with a much
lower percentage.
Gartner expects Linux to continue growing faster and have
more than 1/2 of the new server shipment market
by the end of 2008."
(Even if he is a subscriber, that's an impressive typing speed with very few errors.)
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
i'm not really sure how important linux server shipment numbers are. Many copies will be installed on multiple machines or just downloaded for free.
however it does show continual growth as a general indicater that linux is well accepted in the industry. i know my recent workplace was mostly windows on the desktop but had quite a few linux servers.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain
I appreciate you sharing your problems with us and all, but your entire post is entirely offtopic. Having read it though ... I must say that you know next to nothing about the organisation of OSS projects. It's not all about geeks with pimples playing slaves for IBM ... theres' more ... i'll leave you to discover it for yourself though ...
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups
Lifted directly off www.linuxsucks.org. Troll.
Some of us aren't shady recluses with no other goals in life other than to understand every little thing about computers.
No, some of us are paid shills and astroturfers, aren't we.
Boy, you are just trapped inbetween college and corporate ...
On one hand you bash the corporate linuxes, and in the same breath you judge the 'GNU assholes'
oh and, try working in a corporate environment.
And read up on the Software lifecycle, development is just a fraction of the cost. $400 for RedHat buys you a whole lot more than just the free software.
But then again, why should you, you're an excellent software engineer.
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
This has got to be a troll, but some points are just plain stupid..
/me wipes a tear from his eye...
"have a root password since it was a single user machine" - This is totally normal, every version of Windows since NT has had this. Your probably confused because most peoples home Windows machine logs in with the administrator account. Most linux distro's can log straight into your user account from boot now too, IIRC RedHat 8 allowed this.
"X Windows loaded up and I was in Linux" - This statement just proves you know nothing about Linux or UNIX in general.
"CD ROM icon...where was it? Apparently I had to mount it manually" - IIRC RedHat 8 came by default with amd running, so I am starting to think you never actually intalled RedHat 8.
"it wants the stupid root password again" - BTW you better get used to this, Windows 2003 and above tries to enforce good administrator procedures by getting users to log into their own account, then "Run as..." administrator.
I am amazed that someone who has "studied the Linux kernel in depth" actually gave up on installing a distro because the automatic detection of the sound card didn't work.
"even though its autoupdate some how corrupted my kernel and I had to overwrite it" - Didn't your studying help solve this problem?
"I'm an excellent software engineer" - oh boy... I need to laugh... someone carry on for me please!!
Ahem...
Why are we always shocked to hear that Microsoft might be losing market share to competitor X. When you have such a large segment of any market, you are bound at some point to see your lead eroded away.
Regardless of whether or not you love or hate Microsoft/ Linux, the fact remains that both serve a different purpose at the corporate level. While Linux still leads as the most popular platform for hosting websites, Microsoft's IIS leads in intranet sites for most major companies.
There is a place in the market for both Microsoft and Linux -- Microsoft's biggest problem is IBM and others push of Linux to the masses. Without heavy licensing fees, and with IBM's focus on small business consulting, they can easily modify Linux to suit individual companies wants and desires. This customization, currently, is not a key part of the Windows system. That is what direction, IMO, Microsoft should look in taking itself to compete.
(For the record, the offering of the new stripped down version of XP to many developing nations is one example of truely targetting your market).
Keep in mind that the servers shipped running Linux may be a miniscule fraction of the total Linux servers deployed or being deployed at this point. Presumably one reason for the relative growth of Linux preloads vs Windows preloads will be more competitive prices of Linux preloads and a decline in Windows unloads.
(BTW, when you directly quote an article, it is a good idea to use quotation marks. Otherwise people might think the text was yours.)
...I'll bite anyway...
/dev/cdrom /mnt cdrom | konqueror /mnt/cdrom' - far more hassle than it would have been had I not had a techy moment, but certainly not complex - nowhere near as complex as trying to get my (network card/graphics card/soundcard - choose one) working under almost every Windows version I've used (from Win98 to Server 2003).
.kde*'-ing solved it - thank you Google!). So am I alone in finding all these horror stories about hideously complex interfaces and disasterously misplaced 'rm -rf' commands? I don't think I'm the only one.
I see this sort of opinion piece a lot, and can't help thinking I must have been extraordinarily lucky with my Linux installs - I can honestly say I've had more trouble configuring a Windows installation correctly than I have a Linux one, and the most complex thing I've had to do to get my CD-ROMs working correctly was create a link to it via the KDE desktop context menu - Before I worked that out (right-click should have been my first option, but no, I felt techy) I did it by creating a link to do 'mount -t iso9660
So have I just been lucky and (honestly - Linux gurus, try to think from the perspective of a total newbie like I was) Linux is far from complicated and this guy is just trolling? I'm surprised by the amount of Linux horror stories out there, as I dived straight into Debian without almost any prior Linux knowledge (2hrs on RedHat on a friend's system) and have only managed to wreck things twice (I once nuked my graphics drivers trying an update from CVS and it didn't work at all well - X refused to start, and much poking around with the command-line brought it back to life - I was quite impressed as that was a lot deeper into the CLI than I had been before, and the other time was when I loaded a corrupt theme that managed to nuke my KDE - going in as root to the directory and 'rm -rf
The point about Mandrake is well-founded - I didn't try it out until after I had aquired technical knowledge from curiousity making me poke around in Debian and I just found it extremely limiting - can't log in as root? that would have fucked me right up if I'd nuked my KDE like I did with Debian - I'd be left with no way to fix it on my single-user-and-root system, but Linux in itself is not hard - by the time you've practiced enough to be a Windows 'power user' you'd have acquired the ability to do three times as much under Linux - I'm not even going to mention security, I'm just talking about ability to do things and do them well in an ideal-world system (no viruses, worms, etc). I'm not even trying to plug Linux over Windows here, I like Windows, I still have an XP machine for games and the occasional nostalgia trip, and it is a good OS in many ways, but Linux hugely technical and impossible to use? No sir. I genuinely find it easier to use Linux than Windows now, and I've only had it on my main machine for a few months. I don't think I could have made that switch in reverse that fast - even after just 3 months on Debian I found Mandrake hugely restrictive, and believe me, I am far from a technical person (studying in Psychology, not a hugely computer-related field). I picked up a lot about Linux without even noticing, just poking around with a curious cursor or command or two. A few months on Linux and without even trying, I've acquired enough knowledge about the OS to do many things faster and better than Windows, and I wouldn't go back - Like I said, I like Windows XP, but I find I can now do so much more with my time.
So, Slashdotters, be honest with me - have I been lucky? do I have some sort of mysterious gift? or is Linux actually easy to get into?
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Well, firstly, Im not surprised you got some flamebait modding. What did you expect??
..all the unneeded stuff is removed.
In your rant, you focussed on the install / setup issues with Linux. Firstly, as a loyal Linux user myself, your main problem seems to be that you are not prepared to get your hands dirty. This is what you have to do if you use Linux. You are no longer in your magical lala land where you click on the magical ice cream and everything is just fine - not true. Linux is more honest. Operating systems ARE complex, and if you want to use them then all the better it is that you learn as much as you can about them. Let me put it this way. And this is a classic ananlogy used by many. A car. With Linux you can look under the hood and see the gaskets, valves and battery etc.. In fact with some Linux distos - you are shown this as part of the install - especially my chose distro - Slackware. You actually find yourself learning as you install and configure the system. And this is a deliberate degign by these guys. I guess you have to an optimistic person to use Linux - you have to see the complexity as a learning journey, a right of passage as opposed to an annoying waist of your time. Linux IS honest. From the beginning, you have to learn and if you are prepared to, you WILL make it work, becuase its Open Source - there are documents to show how everything works, and the source code for those documemts to back that up. You set ip up, and you know EXACTLY what you are getting and what its going to do. So why do Linux sys admins get more money than Windows counterparts generally? Isn't it obvious? A Linux sys admin van guarantee you what the server is doing. You have so much more control expecially performance-wise control. You mentioned the kernel - good. What is benefical about compiling the kernel - significant performance gain. You really do have to try it in a different perspective. What if your server is going to perform some mission critical application. What if you need to run a brute force algorithm that (when finished) regardless of the result it generates, will be of Scientific imporance that benefits the commumity as a whole. Wouldn't you like to know you are squeezing every drop of performance you can. Wouldnt you like to know that it probably wont crash ( because you know what its doing) and if it does crash, you can potentially know what caused it to crash with much more ease. What if the algorithm need to run for 5 years on the server (cluster) you have? In these cases performance is everything. By compiling the kernel you are locking the source code down onto the specific architecture of the server. With Windows you get a generic binary ball that is not optimized. With a Linux kernelm you can configure it to remove any bloat you do not need. Lets see, sound drivers - not gonna need them I'll remove that entry, gnome (GUI) not gonna need that - outta there. You can tailor the kernel (the core, and most important ingredient of the OS) for your needs. You can strip it down to the bare minimum so that when its running flat out on a server it is tailored for that server in terms of optimization and what you need in terms of services, whatever they be - samba, bind, tcp
Essentially, the kernel compilation step is a sacred wonderful thing. If you took the time to embrace Linux, you would be enlightened by its power. You are not forced to use anything, particularly not 3rd party propreitary stuff. You make it into whatever you want.
Yes, its challenging but when you're done you can sit back and sigh to tourself "Heck that was painful at times, but I sure got that server stripped down to run flat out. You cannot compare it to Windows.
1) What do they mean by "shipped"? is this only the units sold by people like Redhat, IBM, etc.. Or does it take into account all the versions of Linux download and used? With Windows its easy to say "I have sold x many licences, therefore there are x many servers/users" but with Linux you cant - the numbers are likely to be a lot higher.
2) It's nice to see the SCO lawsuit had such a dramatic effect that the total number of unit of Linux sold has risen. 30+Million dollars of MS^H^H SCO/Venture capital money burnt, with no tangable benefits - other than cementing linux place in the world of IT.
I wonder how worried MS really is about this?
I get an inclining of how the Ewoks/rebels must have felt as the sole destroy, all encompassing, stiffling empire fell apart around them. *sigh* Sometimes life is good...
Jaj
Just yesterady, I got an email from a local sys admin about Win Server 2003. He said it wouldn't boot so he couldn't install it. To make a long story short, he was trying to boot the server with the MS Office 2003 CD (the office suite, not the OS).Later that same day, the same sys admin sent another email about needing to reboot the exchange server to "clear up" a problem.
The moral of this story is that *most* sys admins are not capable of installing or using Linux (or any other OS) unless it's dumbed-down to the childish level of the current Windows OSes.
But what I find most stupid is the philosophy behind it. Why make something so complex for free? I'm an excellent software engineer, good software is hard to make, it's beyond art, takes incredible amounts of education, hardwork and talent, and it should be kept proprietary and one should be paid to make it.
Perhaps we enjoy writing code? Perhaps we want people who otherwise couldn't afford the software to have it? Perhaps we think it's a better way of programming.
Not everything in life is about money, you know.
A virus that transforms a running Windows machine into a Linux machine without even rebooting (which would certainly noticeably interrupt the services on the machine)? And Web services are transferred from IIS to Apache without any interruption? Including the rewrite of IIS specific stuff to Apache specific stuff? And all VBScript code is automatically rewritten in functionally completely equivalent JavaScript? While the whole thing is running?
Anyone who is able to do that would be silly to release it as virus. He could make big money by selling that stuff!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The reason incompetents don't get fired is because competent people cost more, at least from a hard-dollar perspective. Incompetence costs a company money, but in ways that are hard to pin down. It's far too easy for someone to shift blame; one of the keystones of Dilbert-esque companies is that it's virtually impossible to point to one person and say, "The buck stops here." Where I work, you can't even volunteer for the position. People think you're trying to make some kind of power-grab. Management wants to pretend the developers are all interchangeable cogs, shuffling us between teams as staffing needs dictate, and then they wonder why the overall result is mediocre.
I really don't think Microsoft is going to be able to keep to this plan of rolling out an OS on all servers and clients at the same time. No medium to large company is going to buy into such a "Big Bang" implementation plan and if the problem is compounded by breaking the link between Linux and Longhorn then I think there'll be a whole lot less Microsoft desktops and servers around the globe post Longhorn.
This would haunt Microsoft for a long time.
Where I work 80,000+ employees, we naturally have separate server and desktop teams. Making Longhorn networking incompatible with current networking, will make it impossible for us to migrate to longhorn.
Changing the required number of server and client systems to longhorn in order to have a working system would take at least five full weeks.
What company wants to be out of business for five weeks.
Get a free ipod.
This is simply not true. I've spent the last 8 years working for big multinational banks. They all have internal support organizations. When something breaks, you call the tech support hotline, which is usually to the bank's internal support group. In a few banks, this function is contracted out to a company like EDS, whose people would be on-site. Nobody ever calls the manufacturer or the software publisher. I've watched the tech support guys fix problems, and they don't call the manufacturer or software publisher either, they fix the problem themselves (which might sometimes involve replacing the machine or reinstalling the software).
...the point is "you tried". If the market leading OS craps out your production machine, it is Microsofts fault, or Dells, or computers in general, unreliable PoS as they are.
If it is your Linux ISO running on noname (but solid) hardware and it craps out, it is your poor management, incompetence and sys admin skill.
It may be *equally* little your fault, equally little you could have done to prevent it, and nowhere to get damages, yet the perception is completely different. That's the problem.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's good to see that even Gartner believes that Linux and Windows will be comparable in 2008. But they are probably greatly underestimating the number of machines that run Linux as a server OS: most Linux installations aren't "shipped" and are hard to count. I suspect there are already more actual Linux server machines than there are Windows machines.
This is something that the articles and reports often fail to mention. I know at our company every Linux server we have (and we have quite a few) is running a downloaded distribution. The original server shipped with either no OS or with Windows.
Celebrate the finer things in life