Reports of Linux's death premature

I knew what was in store for me when this "journalist" began his story with:

"The Linux community was left stunned...."

OK, so he gives some questionable statistics...stats that have been correctly countered. Where are the stats to back up that we are "stunned".

I have a 12 year old daughter that knows better than that.

helios

We know from your past posts that your Daughter is sharper than you are anyway... so that analogy's blown. :D

LOL...Darn! busted.

Helios is correct though. The first question is simple "what's a open source community?" Then, "who specifically is in the open source community?" "What specifically tells you they were stunned?"

Some rules the writer broke - "don't use generalizations". The first paragraph should go this this:

Who specifically did what to whom? When did it happen? What were the results? Where did it happen? How did it happen?

You have to get specific and use a referential index or the story is just a bunch of generalizations and is therefore disinformation. The writer suxx.

Oh well, we can't send everyone to J-School.

Oh, no doubt tadelste... helois's 12 year old Daughter could write better than that idiot.... seriously!

As no one article provides all of the information I wanted, I went to several different reports on the IDC information, pieced together a few things, and then did some calculations.

The result makes it quite clear why Microsoft is concerned -- though certainly not as concerned as traditional Unix vendors should be.

First, I composed a metric I called the ULW market share. It's based on the idc metrics, and corrected for non-Unix, non-Windows, non-Linux servers.

The numbers -- based on Q3 year to year (I think -- without the actual IDC report, I'm not completely sure that all them apples is really apples rather than oranges):

2005: Windows $4.6B 46.5% ULW Linux $1.4B 14.1% ULW Unix $3.9B 39.4% ULW

2004: Windows $3.9B 44.3% ULW Linux $1.0B 11.4% ULW Unix $3.9B 44.3% ULW

Here's the part that's really getting their goat:

Year to Year growth in ULW share:

Windows: 5.0% Linux: 23.7%

And then, when you consider the great unreported "market", Linux uptake is huge and growing faster by far than Windows servers.

The bottom line: A Microsoft monopoly in the server room is a pipe dream. Monopoly pricing for server products is a pipe dream.

Microsoft's grand vision of the 90s, if it hasn't already failed, is crashing and burning.

Remember: They didn't want to sell a lot of servers. They wanted to own the space.

They don't, and they're not going to.

dino, that looks like a LXer Feature to me.

tuxchick -

I wish I had the whole IDC report...not to mention reports for the last several years.

I was actually pretty startled at the market share growth numbers.

Old line Unix dropped like a rock -- share wise, nearly unchanged in actual revenue. I rather expected that at some point. Commodity Unixes like Linux and *bsd can fill in quite nicely for many Unix applications, and use the same basic skill sets, all at a commodity hardware cost. Hard to resist.

A little surprising is that Microsoft growth seems to be going stagnant while Linux growth is going gangbusters -- and that's without even trying to account for "phantom" Linux installations.

If Microsoft growth slows very much at all relative to Linux growth, Linux will start to gain more absolute revenue growth than Windows in addition to its percentage advantages.

That ought to shiver some Redmond timbers.

it's about The Windows Idiot Tax

The Windows Idiot Tax: For those who still believe that running Windows instead of Linux is cheaper or more cost effective let me give you a real world scenario I discovered today.

Windows: Server hardware 2 x $1250 = $2500 Windows Licenses 2 x $700 =$1400 User Cals 3 x $30 = $90 SQL Server 2000 Standard 1-cpu $1850 Windows TOTAL= $4840

Linux: Server hardware 2 x $1250 = $2500 RedHat download = free MySQL = free (non commercial use) Linux TOTAL=$2500

http://www.oneafrikan.com/archives/2005/11/23/the-windows-id... http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2005/11/th...