Linux Growth In The Workplace Slowing

BrainSurgeon writes "According to a Business Week article Linux growth numbers have slowed for the first time since SG Cowen & Co. began tracking it on their survey. The biggest reason for the slow down according is due to the hidden cost of consultants." From the article: "That doesn't mean overall Linux use is slowing. The survey only shows that a smaller number of companies not using Linux plan to try the software than in previous surveys. Most analysts expect Linux use to grow at the companies that have already rolled it out -- and do so at a healthy rate. And analysts say Linux is picking up steam outside North America, which the Cowen survey doesn't cover."

Comments

Hmmm

[IamTheRealMike]

What kind of developers, Windows or otherwise, can't learn how to write PHP or Qt/GTKmm based C++? They're not exactly new development paradigms or anything.

I suspect the company quoted in the article had a lot of developers who knew what they liked and liked what they knew. The idea of learning a new OS and new APIs didn't really appeal to them, so they just said "we can't do it!" and went off to hire new people.

I dunno. The other theory sounds more likely - Linux is competing very well with older UNIX based installations but isn't attacking the low end server market as well as it could (ASP compatibility?). And desktop is still at the "we're starting to take this seriously" stage rather than "mass deployment every week" stage.

I read somewhere that this study was itself funded indirectly by Microsoft, but who knows. The survey data seems credible. That said a reduction in the number of groups who said they were planning to evaluate it dropping a bit doesn't necessarily mean growth is slowing. Maybe it just means a lot of them got around to it? ;)

Meaningful survey results?

[rice_burners_suck]

Funny thing. At my company, they're using Linux quite a lot and they don't even know it. Granted, this is an industrial company, but computers are used throughout the company. I slowly switched systems running Windows to Linux and FreeBSD over the years. Currently, all of our networking functions are based on these OSes, as are quite a few applications. While the desktops continue to run Windows, the employees don't know that their files are stored on one of several servers, for example. Even the boss doesn't know. He is always concerned about getting things shipped on time, ensuring high quality output, and that sort of thing, and he has no involvement in the geeky computer stuff, where I take care of everything. Little does he know that half of the computers in his company run free software!

The point is: Many companies say they're not switching or thinking about switching, and many of these same companies have no idea that they use this stuff. The people being asked are not necessarily the ones who know. And as I've shown, not only at my employer's company, but also at some other places I've moonlighted for as a poor-man's IT consultant of sorts, many functions can be switched over to Linux to gain higher robustness. The servers running this stuff can be in a closet somewhere. I install everything, back it up, turn it on, and then they forget that it exists, because it Just Works (tm).

So I'm not too sure that these survey results are meaningful.

You are probably right.

[jd]

HTML doesn't vary between servers. (Duh!) Neither does PHP. Cold Fusion could be a problem - but Cold Fusion is always a problem. :)

Java servlets? Java is Java is Java. Perl is, well, Perl. :) Python is most definitely Python.

What does that leave? Well, ASP. asp2php and other conversion tools help, but that would need new skills. MySQL and PostgreSQL are different from Access and SQL Server, but the GUI managers out there are plenty good.

There's the business of configuring Apache, but there are GUI tools for that, too. In fact, between the excellent stand-along GUI tools you can get off Freshmeat, that come with Fedora, or are provided with Webmin, I can't think of much you can't do with Linux in a purely graphical context.

This means that when people complain that Linux isn't "friendly enough", what they really mean is that they're determined not to like it, that when they complain they can't use it, what they really mean is that they don't want to.

There's nothing wrong with choosing not to like something, but it is better to be honest about the fact that it often IS a choice and not something intrinsic about the target.

Re:I am not surprised

[SQLz]

What can 'Windows developers' do? Use a mouse?

No, they make programs so other windows people can point and click their way to IT glory.

Seriously though I agree but it depends. I mean, if you take a VCC guy and ask him for a KDE app, he *SHOULD* be able to do it with a little studying. If the server application in question is just some database interface or server program, the code is 99% the same. Sounds like laziness to me.

Re:But there isn't always someone to take over...

[poningru]

yeah I am gonna call bull to most of that, That's really not true, you know. If Sun stopped supporting Star/OpenOffice, or the guys at MySQL gave up and went home, I'd give you great odds that it would pretty much kill future development of the corresponding product as well, open source or not. You might get the occasional bug fix or minor patch, but that's probably it. ok lets take examples from history where the company stopped making the software: Netscape, AOL stopped netscape dev and handed it off to mofo now what has happend there? a robust and full growth. Basically you are arguing against the strenght of OSS, forking; even if Sun stops making OOo tommorow guess what you are gonna have the community come forward and take over. Now your comments about docs, the docs are created in a OSS project if the user needs'em for example take a look at great enduser OSS: ubuntu, firefox, etc. they all have greate docs.