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Under a Big Blue Shadow

PenguinCandidate writes "Linux server market share numbers can be tricky, with HP touting itself as a leader and IBM garnering all the press. For one analyst, it's all about identity." From the article: "HP can say that it has led the worldwide Linux server market for 29 consecutive quarters. HP can also say with confidence, thanks to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker from May 2005, that it outpaced IBM by nearly eight percentage points in quarterly revenue share. And yet, that Big Blue thundercloud remains. "

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  1. Re:Who contributes more. by tytso · · Score: 5, Informative

    IBM definitely contributes more in the way of core kernel functionality (it's not just JFS, but also we have a number of engineers, myself included, who publically contribute on LKML and on ext2-devel on the ext2/3 filesystem). I'd have to think hard to think of any HP kernel contributors, besides the folks who work on the architecture-specific Itanium code.... (thinking....) Nope, got nothing.

    That being said, I do have to give snaps to HP for employing Keith Packard and Jim Gettys. Keith in particular has been pretty much the only X developer that has been working on new core features in X11 for the past couple of years.

    But in the final analysis, between IBM making 500 patents available, and all of the IBM developers contributing various enhancements to the linux Kernel, it's really not at all surprising that more people think of IBM when it comes to Linux.