Mailing the story:
BSD Advocacy and Breaking Through Market Barriers,
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.