DFS wrote:
> "Linux - 55 million and growing at 2%/week!"
>
> Rex Ballard, lunatic, December 1999
>
> www.open4success.org
Counting Linux was a bit tricky. Bob Young wrote a really good paper
on Sizing The Linux Market, and came up with a few good indicators. I
found a few other good indicators which I used to measure growth.
Microsoft probably has a better count than most companies. Google and
Yahoo also have pretty good counts. And all 3 of those companies are
holding their cards very very closely.
Microsoft considers Linux to be it's biggest single threat. In open
court, under oath, in 1999, Microsoft stated that Linux made up 14% of
the market. If that was 14% of the installed base, that would have
been 170 million machines.
To be fair, it's quite likely that most of these machines were "dual
boot" machines, or "desktop servers" (desktop machines which could be
accessed using VMWare, Cygwin/Xfree, or hummingbird X11).
In 1999, records and surveys indicated that Windows was being sold on
95% of the machines sold by the major OEMs (meaning 5 million machines
were sold with Linux).
That same year, "white box" machines made up 25% of the market, and
most of those machines were sold without Windows. Some of those
machines may have been configured to run Windows using Licenses
transferred from older OEM Licensed machines (a practice which more
recent Microsoft licenses now prohibit).
>From 1997 to 1999, many machines were recycled. Dell leased machines
to corporate customers, and the returned machines were redistributed,
as Linux machines, to charities and organizations in Brazil (now a big
Linux user), China (a huge Linux market with over 1 billion potential
users), India (another linux-friendly market with a population of over
1 billion).
The United States market was still very solidly under Microsoft's
control, but even then, end-users were using Linux in dual-boot
environments. The popularity of Partition Magic and other partition
managers was a strong indicator that users wanted to partition their
disks, and wanted to put Linux on one of the partitions.
At the end of 1999, Corel had entered the Linux market, and had offered
Linux to motherboard manufacturers for 50 cents per copy. As a result,
millions of machines were "licensed for Linux" even though almost none
of them were actually running Linux in their final configuration.
Many Linux machines were also licensed for Windows. This is why
Windows can claim that they have 98% of the market - based on the
number of machines sold with Windows preinstalled by OEMs multiplied by
the average price, vs the published revenues of companies like Red Hat,
and their stated market desktop License revenues.
Even IDC and Gartner began to realize this is a flawed model, because
most Linux vendors offer Linux itself for free or at very low cost, and
make their revenue from support contracts. Microsoft on the other
hand, makes most of their revenue from OEM licenses, and even those
licenses often exceed the actual need.
Even licenses "sold" or licenses "shipped" can be misleading.
Microsoft sells and "ships" licenses which may never be installed, but
are merely "included" as part of larger package deals with OEMs and
large corporations. Are these included in the counts of "shipments"?
It seems that the best measure is the ones that are only available to
the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Measures of browser
signatures coupled with persistent cookies or user IDs, and counting
each ID/OS combination, and carefully detecting "spoof" signatures -
such as Windows signatures with spacing errors - can provide a very
good picture of not only how many Linux machines there are, but how
often Linux is used.
Some estimates put Linux counts as high as 200 million machines, or
roughly 20% of the total installed base. This would be an impressive
number, but there is also an indication that many of these Linux users
are occaisional users, often using Linux in dual-boot environments, or
just rarely using it as a browser.
Several million of these Linux licenses may include Linux "appliances"
such as Tivo boxes, WiFi hubs, Routers, and Network Storage devices or
cases. These may not be true "desktop" machines. That does make the
200 million count more credible, but also reduces the potentiol desktop
counts.
Linux is still growing, and it's still in a "cooperative" relationship
with Microsoft products.
Those who see Linux as the "Death of Microsoft" are probably deluded.
This includes me at the time when I thought that the migration to Linux
would be exclusion of Microsoft. Today, even when Linux is the primary
operating system, the pragmatic approach is to continue to use Windows
as a "client" which allows Linux computers to run Windows applications,
even those which require "true" Windows compatibility. The Windows
license also provides critical libraries.
Even solutions such as Win4Lin and Crossover, include Windows licenses,
the main difference is that the license is just for the core libraries,
since the libraries plug into WINE or Xen, which handles the hardware
interfaces. Still, it is enough to be able to run nearly any Windows
application with minimal adverse impact. Ironically, some Windows
applications actually run faster when running under Linux.
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