Many times this article looks at sales figures for free software. I realize it's hard to find good numbers but sales figures most certainly are not the way to get these numbers. I have installed Linux on 15 computers and I have purchased exactly 3 copies of Linux.
Any other company doing this would likely purchase a single copy or perhaps download a disk image. We definitely need a different way of measuring than using sales figures.
Linux on the desktop makes more sense from a slightly different perspective. In-house programmers in medium and large companies can download open source projects that do 90% of what they need for an in-house program and they can customize it the rest of the way to be a perfect fit. (I watched one company struggle writing their own program from scratch for around 5 years.) Thus saving their company huge amounts of development costs. Since most of these open source projects don't support Windows it is likely necessary to run Linux on the desktop for their users to be able to use these projects (or the xfree86.cygwin.com project might work)
Open source makes sense for medium and large companies. It makes sense for small companies who have access to someone who understands Linux. (doesn't take much. I set up a single server that acts as internet gateway/firewall, dhcp server, file server, and vpn link using an old machine the client had lying around) (I don't recommend mixing file server with firewall but it is cheap)
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Many times this article looks at sales figures for free software. I realize it's hard to find good numbers but sales figures most certainly are not the way to get these numbers. I have installed Linux on 15 computers and I have purchased exactly 3 copies of Linux.
Any other company doing this would likely purchase a single copy or perhaps download a disk image. We definitely need a different way of measuring than using sales figures.
Linux on the desktop makes more sense from a slightly different perspective. In-house programmers in medium and large companies can download open source projects that do 90% of what they need for an in-house program and they can customize it the rest of the way to be a perfect fit. (I watched one company struggle writing their own program from scratch for around 5 years.) Thus saving their company huge amounts of development costs. Since most of these open source projects don't support Windows it is likely necessary to run Linux on the desktop for their users to be able to use these projects (or the xfree86.cygwin.com project might work)
Open source makes sense for medium and large companies. It makes sense for small companies who have access to someone who understands Linux. (doesn't take much. I set up a single server that acts as internet gateway/firewall, dhcp server, file server, and vpn link using an old machine the client had lying around) (I don't recommend mixing file server with firewall but it is cheap)