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Linux Server Sales to Reach $9.1 Billion by 2008
dunric writes "ZDNet is reporting that sales of servers using Linux will reach a whopping $9.1 billion by 2008. Annual revenue for Linux servers is expected to grow by a healthy 22.8 percent, compared to just 3.8 percent for the overall server market. Additionally, Linux servers will account for nearly 26% of all server shipments."
Keep in mind that the $9.1bn number is in hardware sales, not software.
You are missing one other major point, vendor lock in. If you run a company and develop your own in house applications, it is much more difficult to switch from AIX to Solaris than it is to switch from Red Hat Linux to SUSE Linux. Porting between different Linux distros is much much much easier than porting between different flavours of Unix.
OpenOffice.org, Mozilla (all 3 major programs), StarOffice, AMSN, America's Army, Unreal Tournament and Enemy Territory. I just named you 10 applications that will run under pretty much any Linux distro unmodified. Try naming me 3 that will run under AIX, Solaris and HP-UX unmodified and without recompilation.
Let's talk hypothetical here - Let's say Sun releases Solaris under a nice license that satisfies everybody [...] Right there, the Linux pricepoint and community support is matched.
:-)?
Linux may suck, but to me, Solaris and AIX suck much, much worse.
so if I am totally missing something, would some more-informed Linux guru clarify
You know, I can't presume to tell you what you should like.
To me, AIX's system management was a constant source of problems, their logical volume manager was a disaster, and their attempts at "improving" the UNIX linker were inept. SunOS/Solaris was even lower quality, with serious kernel and user level bugs and gaping security holes, and an utter unwillingness by Sun to address those.
I'm not sure what you see in AIX and SunOS/Solaris, but that's why they make all kinds. I was a SunOS/Solaris user for 15 years and an AIX user for 5 and you couldn't pay me enough to go back. I would hope to be able to use something nicer than Linux at some point, but so far, sadly, there is nothing that's better out there (no, Darwin doesn't cut it and neither did BeOS either; Windows NT seems hell-bent on repeating the mistakes of systems that even predate UNIX; Plan9 showed some promise, but it hasn't caught on so far).
There are a number of admins out there that won't buy a shrinkwrapped linux server because the prices are just insane. IBM and HP/Compaq think that you'll pay 3 times the going rate for memory, storage, processors, etc...just for the perk of having a "big name" badge on the computer.
So I've just resigned myself to rolling my own 1RU and 2RU server systems. Then I throw CentOS http://www.centos.org/ , a RHEL clone, on them. That saves me a couple thousand per server.
I used to be a big fan of the Proliant line, but the prices just got to be so ridiculous. They haven't figured out that this is a commodity market yet. Oh well.