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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."
For all the talk of Linux, only 230,074 machines, or about 14.7 percent of shipments, were servers
running Linux. However, all of those Linux machines added up to a smidgen more than $1 billion
in sales for the quarter.Check more details here
fifteen jugglers, five believers
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 guess we see this rise mostly from the various Unix brands getting thrown out of companies. My own employer is replacing Solaris (50 big servers, 250 workstations) with Linux wherever possible. A RedHat server license might be damned expensive when compared to a Microsoft server (and yes, I do mean bulk pricing for "enterprises"), but it's quite cheap if you compare it to a Solaris machine.
http://www.linuxsucks.org/read.html?postid=8345&re plies=39&page=1
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...
once you understand that this isn't windows and accept that, you'll almost be ready to use linux. Then what you gotta do (and this is hard) is realize that, yes, you can learn new things after windows.
linux isn't windows. it was never meant to be (well, as you discovered, fc2 comes as "close" as any linux distro as has.)
A big problem new linux users seem to encounter is the huge difference in how hardware is interfaced. in windows you run a setup.exe and magically a box pops up and says you have a new network card working.. WOW!. In linux, the kernel has the code for many, many, many NIC's already, and most distro's will include all of them compiled as modules in their default kernels and load the appropriate one when you boot. However, sometimes you'll have 'odd' hardware and it wont be able to find a module for your device... adding new code to your kernel (via patching) or compiling a module outside of the kernel tree isn't ever easy and this is where novice users will fall down and scream till' their blue in the face that "linux blowz".
Once you do it a couple times for various peices of hardware (NIC's [be it wifi or otherwise], video or sound [doesnt happen much, alsa is now included in the 2.6 kernels]) you realize it's not too terrible.. but it takes a lot of time to get a good feel for everything in linux/unix. The power of unix is in the terminal and always has been. If you dont know much about unix shells before your initial linux experience you'll be left with a severely crippled experience.
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).
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.
You say that good code is like a work of art - if it is, then why don't you do what an artist does? An arist creates a small number of great paintings(programs), has a showing (creates a company website), and sells them to the highest bidder, and sells each painting only once. The artist does not care if that painting is subsequently copied by another artist - in fact, it is seen as a compliment by most!
Your age shows in the post (first tried RedHat 8.0 in University), so let me educate you a bit on the history of programming. Before Microsoft came along, it was common that software (and a whole lot of its code) was free. Why? Because most programmers worked for hardware companies, who were interested in selling hardware.
Does IBM make any less money if it ships a server running Linux or Windows? No, in fact they likely make more money since they don't need the Windows license markup and can thus charge less.
Personally, *my* wish in life is that eventually, all "software companies" are abolished; programmers will either work for hardware companies customizing their OS/driver platforms, or they will work as consultants, customizing existing open source software to the business, with the end product from both of these endevours going back to the public.
Really, if I as company X spend some time customizing an application to by business, what harm does it do to release the code? None, other than it may save someone else time and money in the long run. God forbid it be a compeditor - but what if it saved a non-profit like World Vision millions of dollars??? Isn't that worth it? Are you really that greedy of a copany, that the chance that it may help a competitor outweights the chance that you could be saving people's lives? (Sze note: from the behaviour of most companies, the answer is a resounding yes.)
Just as a note, I say the above as a professional programmer with a software company as well. I know to some people like you it might seem weird for me to be advocating the elimination of my profession, but really, I am in it for the love of what I do, not the love of money. When you do something for the love of what you do, you will always find a way to make ends meet.
Can anyone track down the original Gartner report that indicated 50% of server sales would be Linux by 2008? The linked article just mentions the Gartner report (and all-important statistic) in passing, but doesn't provide a proper reference for fact-checkers. Google didn't do the trick for me, it did turn up an article about an IDC report released in June 2004 that predicted Linux server shipments would rise to 29% in 2004, a fairly significant difference.
Novell's stock is looking pretty attractive at $5.80, given that they're trading close to their 52-week low and now own SuSE, one of Red Hat's only commercial competitors. Mind you, Red Hat is actually earning a profit these days, even though their price::earnings ratio is about 100.
So is it time to invest in Linux stocks (again), except this time with an eye for the long-term instead of the wild ride of the late 90's?
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.
27.9% of statistics are made up.
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
If by preinstalled unit sales, presumably sometime in the next four years.
If by distribution sales, probably next year or the year after.
If by legitimate installed base, Linux is probably well in the lead already.
If by total installed base including warez, probably next year or the year after.
If someone makes a virus that downloads a modified Debian and replaces MS-Windows, IIS and VBSCript with it without noticeably interrupting the services on the machine, about two weeks after that.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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.
I wonder if they count SOHO (small office home office) network appliances in the count. Many of the small easy to manage small network storage and connectivity appliances use Linux or OO software. Examples that come to mind are some of the broadband routers, the ActionTec dual PC modem, and the Buffalo LinkStation net attached storage and print server.
Windows OS prices and bloat keeps MS products off these embeded OS items, even though MS markets their embeded Win CE as a capable product for the embeded devices market.
The truth shall set you free!
While it is news that even Microsoft admits that Linux is making inroads in the server market, there shouold also be a warning here.
Microsoft is almost certainly not going to take this lying down. Their biggest development effort right now is Longhorn. Some of the things that they say about Longhorn (the fact that they need to roll it out on clients and servers at the same time, in particular) makes me think that they will modify the networking protocols enough that Linux servers will no longer be able to play with Microsoft desktops.
Many large companies out there are running Windows on the desktop and connecting them to Linux servers. I think when Longhorn is released they may not have any choice about what server software to use anymore.
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.
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.
...XPSP2 and decide that longhorn just isn't worth it-the risk, cost, headache, bugs, etc- and switch the desktops to some linux instead of the servers back to MS.
Honestly, the only thing I can see coming with MS is for them to go completely on the offensive with patents and copyright lawsuits and hope to scare and bully and maybe even legislate their way to staying topdog. I don't see them being able to do it on just quality/price and a normal market scene for much longer. The only people left who aren't considering Linux are very casuasl and unsophisticated home users, anyone more technologically savvy above that level is at least thinking about linux now. At some time MS will feel threatened enough to start using their portfolios very agressively, think SCO type action times 1,000. They could carve out a few billion just to start the lawsuits and not break sweat. Then they could start lobbying. We have the easiest bribed legislature and executive branch and probably judges evah now. This is the most high level "consultant fee" friendly government I can remember going way back. Those who already have the coin to spread around are not hesitating to "share the wealth" with those charged with maintaining what passes for "law" nowadays.
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).
Look into it. Gartner ALWAYS favours Microsoft products. (ie. "Windows has 95% of the market share" -- this stats doesn't include cell phones, PDAs, game platforms, but does include sales of old PCs.) Skewed for sure.
Wonder why? Look into it. Gartner Inc. is a "separate" firm created by a certain firm to create (sell) all of these statistics (ultimately to serve the purposes of the firm.) Microsoft owns at least 20% of this underlying firm.
...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