Slashdot Mirror
Linux To Take Over Microsoft In Enterprises
shougyin writes "For years, Linux has enjoyed much of its success as a replacement for Unix. Companies turned to Linux to replace Unix servers, or for new deployments within a Unix-heavy environment. Linux is still king there, but it's starting to encroach on Microsoft as well. Big companies are planning overwhelmingly (76.4%) to add more Linux servers in the next year, and less than half (41.2%) of the companies are planning to add Windows servers in the next year. Even more interesting, nearly half (43.6%) are actively planning to decrease use of Windows servers in the next year."
For a second, I read that as "Linus To Take Over Microsoft".
This week, bogus statistics pushing an increasingly boring anti-microsoft zealotry and a pro-"operating system that takes at least one more step than windows to run any popular application or game" agenda.
I would expect no less from pseudointellectuals.
I know quite a few companies who run 3-4 Windows servers for ActiveDirectory domain controllers and a lot of Linux servers as AD clients.
Once Samba4 is released, these Windows servers could be replaced as well.
you pretend to be a news site when really your just a den of linux loving commies.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This survey is not statistically representative by all means. It is done amidst users that already use Linux and done by a Linux advocacy. I am no MSFT fan. I have not had a Windows machine in my house since 1997 (and even that was Win 3.x running under OS2 Warp). However, the reality is not as rosy as this survey would like us to see.
First of all, the majority of Windows users are SMEs and they are Windows _ONLY_. They _WILL_ buy more of the same and that is a definite. A lot of the rest is desktop estate and its essential dependencies - Exchange and their friends. 95% of these will be buying more of the same. There are very few successful desktop migrations to account for anything more than that. Even that will be an underestimate. 99% buying more of the same is more likely.
That leaves "enterprise" backend use which is pretty much what this survey is about. There is a lively migration racket going on there nowdays as most of this runs in the form of Java and friends on top of middleware stacks. Every 1-2 years the latest and greatest backend idea comes along with its migration programme. As a result servers and stacks get chucked out and replaced by others.
There Linux is gaining and the numbers are about right. However that is a very small portion of the market and misrepresenting it for the whole market is to the very best disingenuous. Additionally, it also completely ignores the "Elephant In The Corner of The Room". The merger of Sun and Oracle has created a vertical stack which will once again effectively compete for their place under the sun (pun intended) in the server room. Any stats regarding enterprise migration that assign (Sn)Oracle a negative year on year growth are frankly wishful thinking.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
wake me up when Linux starts taking over Microsoft in Desktops.
I'm happy about it, but not surprised. As the old generation of IT admins go away, newer ones are more flexible and have ways of saving money without MS in the equation. Linux is not the only solution, but one competitive alternative. Different is the Desktop, partially because it is not baked up big companies like the kernel and enterprise tools are. Canonical is an exception, but sadly a more or less lonely one.
I thought it was very funny to see 41% called "less than half", and 44% called "almost half! :D
Technically correct and true, yes, but I smell bias...
I could see both big and small companies reducing their amount of microsoft servers in the future for a couple of reasons.
1) They are joining their BPOS cloud services and therefore have less need for their own in house MS production servers. Large % of big business is joining the cloud.
2) The new server topology for exchange requires whole new separate servers or hyperv virtual servers for edge (either way its a separate server license) in addition to their CAS, hub transport, mailbox servers, etc.
Really, does this work? I'm genuinely curious. I wonder if in the 2008 elections, for example, all the newspapers and media had reported that John McCain was ahead by a huge margin if he would have won. Does the "Linux Foundation" really think polling linux users asking about trends is going to mean anything, or do they think it's going to create some impetus in the market to move to Linux? Either one seems a bit daft to me.
Who was surveyed?
from the TFA:
the organizations surveyed were picked by the Linux Foundation End User Council
Next up:
10 out of 10 randomly selected stock brokers want more deregulation of the financial system
10 out of 10 randomly selected Taliban fighters don't trust the USA
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Wait ... is this then finally the year of the Linux desktop????? Has it finally arrived?? Oh wait be right back, it seems hell has just frozen over.
In related news, 82% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
41.2% is `less than half', yet 43.6% is `nearly half'. Who thinks samzenpus' threshold between these two phrases is really between these two numbers. Also: Douglass Adams fans, 0.42 == 42% != 42.
Ok samzenpus, what did MS do to you this time?
Seriously, three stories in a row? Were they all really the best of the bunch in the submission queue?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I really did intend to finish reading until I stumbled upon the second paragraph.. "surveyed nearly 2,000 users picked by the Linux Foundation End User Council"
I recommend a small change to the title of the article. "How not to conduct an objective survey assuming you expect anyone to take it seriously"
well, maybe this should get fixed first: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/22974/
So thats NX1 , NCC-1701 , and NCC-1701D ?
wake me up when they use it on Voyager
62.6% of decision makers in SME's only know about the existence of Windows as a server OS.
83.7% of decision makers would buy anything that is bought by the majority of their peers.
4.23% of decision makers are fed up having to buy extra CALs for their Windows server whenever they hire people, 68.2% don't understand their licensing obligations or how the BSA can raid their premises as a result - and 53.1% wouldn't - frankly my dear - give a damn, even when they would understand the licensing.
97.5% of marketing hype originates from the Microsoft camp - a tiny fraction from the Linux side, our POOTA 2010 (*) calculator had not enough significant decimals to describe it other than 0.0% but since this seems unprofessional, we put down the much nicer 0.0234%
* Pull Out of Thin Air - model 2010
I do not trust such assessments as much I do not trust assessments which point in the opposite direction. As much as I would like to see OS prevail CS, I do not believe this will happen any time soon or even in the distant future (under the assumption that our economic regime will not change).
Anyway, a major show stopper for small business to convert to Linux-based infrastructures is the SBS from Microsoft. Small companies have as a service infrastructure these SBS servers, which provide a mail directory service, calendars, address books. It provides web based access to these services as well as an Outlook integration. And it comes with share-point, which is also a requirement. And finally it works with all these smartphones, especially Blackberries and iPhones.
Therefore a migration effort has to take into account that the same functionality has to be provided with better QoS. While better QoS ist not the problem, the same functionality is a serious problem. Especially when it comes to more detailed properties.
But even worse, migration cannot be done in an overnight attempt. These always fail and in the end you loose a customer and they switch to MS for the rest of their lives. Therefore you need a soft migration strategy. And this is the key problem here.
While you can provide most features with lets say egroupware (which is not such a good idea, a servlet based approach would be better) you still need IMAP (dovecot), SMTP (postfix) and LDAP to model the mail service. Egroupware can also provide these calendars. But how do you replace Sharepoint? And especially how do you integrate with Sharepoint? While you switch to webdav oder sftp etc. the client's clients will not switch (at the same time). So you still need to integrate both services.
I have not seen any generic strategy for this problem. And honestly there are hundreds of thousands of small companies using SBS. And bigger companies use similar services.And the Blackberry-integration into a replacement infrastructure is very important as all these business guys use it.
I thought they were a myth!
Is it Redmond Day?
"That's the word from the Linux Foundation's report on adoption trends. The report was conducted by the Yeoman Technology Group, and surveyed nearly 2,000 users picked by the Linux Foundation End User Council. The results released yesterday were culled from 387 respondents that are from the largest organizations -- companies with more than 500 employees and/or more than $500 million a year in revenue" link
"The Linux Foundation, in partnership with Yeoman Technology Group, recently conducted a survey of 1,948 Linux users. This invitation-only survey pool was comprised of the Linux Foundation End User Council as well as other companies, organizations and government agencies selected by The Linux Foundation and Yeoman" link
Do we have AD like single sign on at least for linux servers? No? How about clients then? No?
Seriously, how do you guys handle root password management for servers? SSH is not the real answer here, IMHO.
While Linux is certainly the much lower costs option vs. MS, the real issue should be about Security. The problem though, is that many of *nix, is the fact that since Windows is so easily cracked. And once cracked, they have access to SSH keys and/or passwords and the ability to place a snooper. Once you have access to being on ANY TYPE BOX, it is over. It is simply a matter of time before it is fully owned. This does not matter if it is windows, Linux, OSX, trusted Linux, trusted Solaris/AIX/HP-UX, or even a os/390.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
RedHat support cost is killing the opportunity to increase linux in enterprises... Windows licenses are cheaper!
It's called server consolidation. I'm slated to decrease my server count by about 40% in the next 5 years. It's not to avoid Windows, it's to avoid buying those servers again in 5 more years. Hardware has come a long way and I've finally got the old geezers to change the way things are done around here.
similar tactics yield similar results. there's only time, space & circumstance, which can only change. ayn rand may have written her book (the softwar gangsters' 'bible') a little differently had she known just how much we really do need each other. our inattention to that simple direction will be our demise. there's still a LOT of poisonous (to lilfe) randoidian 'thinking' & behaviors (selfish) festering around our trustdead 'leaders' decision making processes, no?
OTOH: A good UNIX-like admin-policy allows you to administer large or even huge amount of systems at a fraction of the cost compared to Windows.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
another special JuSt yet,1 but I'm else to be an that has lost
... and Duke Nukem Forever it's coming soon! Sheezz...
restores our faith
Windows 7 software feels like a downgrade (UI wise) from XP and from the technical perspective they decided to not allow the old NT/XP drivers that control our machinery to run in Windows 7, so we would need to rewrite them using the new WDK7, again that means throwing thousands of lines of code and QA testing out of window. Do they plan to do this with any future iteration of their OS? Shouldn't we really stick with something that have some predictability and permanency? Is there some NT or XP based Windows due in 2011?
No you're not. An MS fanboi, maybe but there's nothing wrong with less than half at 41% and nearly half at 44%. After all, at some point, it can no longer be called "nearly half" and there will be a number that is "less than half" and one right next to it which is "almost half", no matter where you draw the distinction.
That you assert this is amusing and evidence of bias is where I assert proof you are a linux hater, not a linux fan.
I'm not a die hard Windows advocate but the fact still remains that it still has deeply saturated the marketplace. Unless Linux can gain share on the home PC in terms of usability and compatibility the end users will still be favoring Windows. Outside of the technical minded end users most just want to use something they know.
Would you care to comment on whether Samba4 is useful only for replicating MS technologies in the network, or also for use in a pure Linux/POSIX environment (UNIX, Linux, Mac)?
Can you use pure Kerberos (not the MS version), or is that recommended?
And can Linux Terminal Server Project tie into this in some way (serve an appropriate terminal image based on a Samba profile)?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I'm just trying to think of some area of tech/i.t./communications where MS is increasing it's sales ...
... Still thinking!
America, Home of the Brave.
As a poll taken by the Linux Foundation based on the answers of two hundred of it's largest members that responded, what I found suprising is that less than half of them plan on increasing their use of Linux - these are the biggest supporters of Linux, and 50%+ ARE NOT PLANNING TO INCREASE THEIR USE OF LINUX!
These are Linux's biggest supporters (they joined the foundation, they replied to the survey, and they are of a certain size) - if half of them aren't increasing use of Linux, to me that is the interesting number. If 50%+ of the largest members of the Oracle Users Group said they were not going to increase use of Oracle DB that would be the story, why is the spin backwards here? Oh yeah, Linux Foundation wrote the press release, slashdot partitas it...
Ken
That last line should say "...Slashdot parroted it."
My iPhone didn't think I meant to write parroted...
Ken
The article itself even admits as much: "Since the organizations surveyed were picked by the Linux Foundation End User Council, there's naturally going to be some happy Linux users in the bunch."
While we're throwing meaningless statistics around, we might as well also toss in a mostly meaningless anecdote. I work in a small satellite R&D office of a medium sized company. Corporate HQ runs big iron (IBM) and Windows servers. The primary server and most of the desktops in our office run Windows, and always have (this office was opened in 2005, the primary server is still the original one). However, the last two servers we've added have been Linux-based, and two of the software developers have switched to using Linux as their primary desktop OS (I am one of the two who have switched).
I unfortunately worked at a cloud startup for about a year. Besides being one of the shittiest contracts I've had, it was just outright weird at times. The stupidity was overwhelming, the buzzwords were constantly flying, and the cash sure as fuck wasn't flowing.
I was in several meetings where grown men started to cry when others pointed out flaws like you've mentioned. After 25+ years in various sectors of many industries at many companies, I never thought I'd be in a meeting discussing a technology, only to have men who were in their 30s and 40s start bawling like babies.
There is something seriously wrong with many cloud computing advocates. It's a religion to them, if it's not an outright mental disorder. If criticism of your technology will bring you to tears, you seriously need to find a much different line of work.
I agree with everyone when they say that statistics can be tossed around and manipulated. The one thing this article does not talk about is environment variables. For example a web hosting company might run an all Linux environment. Where some company's might have run all windows for there infrastructure and just have a few Linux servers for web hosting and utility servers. I know Cisco and Juniper have dropped Windows support on the backend and went with Linux support for logging and traffic monitoring.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
41% is less than half in one sentence, but 43% is nearly half in the next. I guess 42% is the hard cutoff by which we begin referring to the statistic in the affirmative vs. the negative.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Maybe the damn thing is so good they don't need any more!!!!! :~ ) Nu.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
..are probably running them on big VMWare-based servers which runs Windows under, ummm, Linux.
Anyone who has been in a large corporate data center knows the ugly truth - Microsoft servers still don't like to multitask. The usual response is to install yet another bit of hardware to run the smallest of applications. Bad for the environment, good for Intel and Microsoft.
Hummmm, has anyone tried to sell Linux to corporations because it is good for the environment?
You know, about 30 years ago (1978 to be specific) there was this strange thing called "KERBEROS"... it still works. Single-Sign-On is a non-issue in the UNIX-world. It was solved 30 years ago.
Another great argument for thinking a little bit before giving good things stupid names.
did you forget to take your meds?
2011 is the year of 'Linux in the enterprise'!
the time it took to gain the experience on Windows needs to be factored in just as much as the time taken to learn the Linux stuff
There is far more local competition among candidates for employment for a Windows sysadmin job than for a Linux one. So if there are people living within 5 mi (8 km) of your office who have already gained this experience and are proudly listing it on their resumes, that cost gets figured into the starting pay that your organization offers. So when switching to a different server operating system, your organization has to either retrain or rehire sysadmins.
As soon as we get a free, stable, and useful free desktop OS...Windows is done. Ubuntu perhaps?
According to PCWorld, the Linux Desktop is dead(?)
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
If a Windows tech says it'll cost money to train him up and then cost more to install Linux, get a Linux tech and lose the Windows one.
Firing and hiring is not without cost. Consider the cost of reading resumes, interviewing, training the new hire in your business's practices, and unemployment benefit payments for the employee whose position was eliminated.
Maybe the biggest Linux supporters have hit 100%. It would be difficult to increase their use much beyond that.
It all depends on how you slice the statistics, Maybe times are tough and they just aren't increasing anything.
Have gnu, will travel.
LOl, so true. The sad thing is Microsoft took Kerberos, bastardized it and changed the name to AD so most people are ignorant that "Single Signon" technology was not developed by Uncle Bill. [...]
AFAICT, what they actually cloned is the DCE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environment
No shop of any real size (take the 500 employee threshold cited in the survey) is 100% linux not all desktops and servers, not even Red Hat I suspect. There are always certain applications that require Windows or Mac.
Also, are these 100% Linux users not planning to expand/grow (more employees)?
Ken
You should have read further. The article summary pointed to another article that showed that the companies they were interested in were large companies and government agencies with $500 million or more a year in revenue and more than 500 employees. As such, their board did select users, in much the same way any pollster or survey creator selects users by setting the parameters or bounds of the sample. Now, as to whether this is valid, well, yes it is valid. It does not appear to be a statistical sample, though, which means you cannot extrapolate the findings to the population as a whole.
What can be said is that in those companies surveyed, linux deployment is increasing at the expense of windows. The key part being "in those companies surveyed." If it had been a statistical sample, then the title of the slashdot article might have been accurate.
APOLOGIES!
I got my numbers confused, instead of half, it's one-fourth of respondents, not half. I read this before my morning caffeine.
The point is the same, as pointed out here: http://zgp.org/~dmarti/business/hands-up-who-likes-me/ this is the definition of a self-serving survey.
These are current users of Linux, they tend to report bugs and contribute code at amazingly higher proportion than the general linux user population, are members of a Linux user organization AND choose to respond to the survey. Not one respondent that does not run Linux - you don't join a users group if you don't run the OS/application...
If you want to survey the industry, reach out to the Forbes 500 and ask them what the run in the server room, on the desktop this year (as a percentage), and what they did last year and what their plans are for next year. That will tell you everything you need to know about the state of Linux adoption in the commercial sector.
Any survey that equates General Electric's response with Pete's totally cool web design and PC repair service is meaningless.
Ken
We recently had our website redesigned, and our designers suggested we host at GoDaddy. I suggested that we host internally since it would save us $100/month, and thanks to VMware's ESXi, we've freed up a bit of hardware recently.
We are almost completely a Mac OS and Windows shop. I ran Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu - as well as Solaris all through college, so Unix is familiar to me.
I have to say that setting up a LAMP server with SSH was a piece of cake. Our newest Ubuntu server distribution did almost everything for you. I didn't edit a single config file, and security updates are installed automatically - no manual CRON job configuration was necessary.
We had to tweak some permissions, but it was fairly painless.
Finally we snapshot the entire box once per week using VMware's tools as a backup - really easy.
I've got to say, I've been away from Linux for a few years and was pleasantly surprised at how refined it has gotten. Microsoft should be worried.
-ted
I'm curious how many of these Linux servers are VMware (yeah it's not really Linux) and XenServer.....
I've worked in SME's for the past few years and I've seen a definite, slow, consistent shift away from windows, though not necessarily to Linux. I get many, many requests for Mac computers.
This, I think, is still a win for linux because of how much more close, even though significantly far apart, Mac OS and Linux are.
No shop of any real size (take the 500 employee threshold cited in the survey) is 100% linux not all desktops and servers, not even Red Hat I suspect. There are always certain applications that require Windows or Mac.
Desktops, perhaps not. You always need to keep one or two around in case some idiot can't read the instructions and sends you proprietary content. But 100% Linux servers is do-able.
Also, are these 100% Linux users not planning to expand/grow (more employees)?
In the next year (the period the statistics cover)? Perhaps not. Times are tough.
And then a shop that is 80% Linux figures they'll just add one Windows system for every four Linux ones, keepingg the Windows infestation rate constant.
Have gnu, will travel.
and dominates BAD.
most of the IIS servers generally happen to be the web outlets, extensions of small business infrastructures of small businesses. and they run 1-2 websites belonging to them. however, in shared hosting world, linux is de facto the king, and an ordinary linux box houses 100 to 200 websites, belonging to different individuals or businesses.
the difference in between these, because shared hosts give 200 sites over one shared ip, and iis servers generally run a few websites, it seems like there are more websites being served by iis servers than they really do. on one side a linux server hosts and serves 100 different sites on one or a few ips, on the other side a iis server serves 2-3 websites over the same amount.
moreover, microsoft makes deals with some hosts like godaddy to have their domain park page served from iis servers, to bolster statistics in that fashion.
this is why microsoft always uses ipserver os linkage in statistics. even at that rate, unfortunately they are not able to boast anything. last i heard was what, 2 years ago ? now they arent even talking over ips anymore. seems like even that trick is useless.
Read radical news here
I would love for Linux to start making a dent in Microsoft's server market. Who knows, maybe that will even help with Linux in the desktop market too. Personally, Linux has a ton of advantages over Windows. I say this while running both operating systems, and seeing Linux excel over Windows daily.
I thought Novell's "NDS" (novell directory services) has been ported over to, or rather, works w/ Linux, via SuSE? Thanks for the correction in case I am wrong/off here!