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BSD Advocacy and Breaking Through Market Barriers,

Posted by caitlyn on · 3 comments
Open Source Business Resource; By Melanie Groves VonFange 		Mail this story
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Currently, proprietary businesses dominate the operating systems market. In 2008, Microsoft Windows controlled 87.9% of the market with Mac OS X following up with 9.73%, leaving only 2.37% of the market to open source alternatives. However, in the past year alone, Linux market share has grown from .80% to 1.02% (a 27.5% increase) and other open source operating systems have grown from .22% to .58% (a 163% increase). These figures translate into millions of open source operating system users. The question is how to continue these upward trends and break the stranglehold that proprietary operating systems have on the markets. This article discusses the role that open source advocacy plays in increasing open source usage.

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Comments (3)

caitlyn Story submitter ·
The only problem I have with this article is that Ms. VonFange starts by quoting market share numbers for Linux/BSD/FOSS operating systems which we know are understated severely. Starting with a false premise is never terribly helpful. In this case the rest of the article about BSD and general FOSS advocacy is very good.
number6x ·
If OS/X is included in the BSD's (as it is a derivative), BSD would have a much larger market share.

I think that a good argument could be made for awarding 50% of Sun's market share to BSD as well. Sun is kind of a hybrid BSD + SYS V Frankenstein kind of creature.
Steven_Rosenber ·
Look at this article. It talks about a monolithic BSD with no mention of the major and minor projects that make up the various BSD-derived operating systems. Not even FreeBSD, which I suspect the author is really talking about -- although I have no way of knowing.

Excepting the "resources" links at the bottom, there's not one mention of even a single BSD project, nor anything any of the projects is doing (or not doing, as the case may be) on either the desktop, the server or the embedded market.

There's no "there" there.

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