Infoworld Article on Linux Growth

rdsmith writes "This week's Info World has a short article on Linux and its growth over the past few years. It makes a couple of mentions of ESR and the Halloween document. Although the article bases Linux's growth on numbers provided by Redhat, it's still good press for Linux. "

IDG's report

[Patrik Nordebo]

Didn't IDG give Linux a 17% market share, and Unix about the same?

IDG's report

[Analog]

IIRC, Linux had a 17.4% market share, and all the commercial unices combined had 17.6%.

IDG's report

[deno]

17% of the SERVER market, based entirely on SALES, i.e. according to them 17% of the people who actually decided to pay for an web/ftp/whatever server decided they would rather buy a Linux package than anything else.

Two important words here are SERVERS (i.e. we are not talking about win95/98) and SALES (i.e. we are not talking about the ftp-downloads either)

finally...

[mackga]

Someone mentions a figure more than 7 million, which seemed to hang in there with the tenaciousness of a nasty cold.

Yes, every day is Halloween at InfoWorld.

[CRConrad]

Their Editor-in-Chief, Sandy Reed, is on record claiming "NT clearly is the future of computing". Just check their "Web-based voting" forum [infoworld.com] from March/April 1997; especially "Take a look at this Sandy Reed post [infoworld.com]". For some reason, the post mr Joswig refers to gives a 404 error... But then, IWE's forum software has a habit of crashing now and then, mysteriously mangling posts which make good points againt M$ and IW's pro-M$ bias (I know, it's happened to me too). Anyway, when mr Joswig wrote that, it was still there to be checked, so I don't think he made it up. Another goodie is her post Why should I apologize? [infoworld.com] -- Her unsubstantiated allegation that "OS/2 Zealots stuffed the ballot" (on the front page of the print edition) has not yet been retracted; all she did was a lame, half-hearted "apology" for calling them "zealots", buried inside her column a few weeks later.

Christian R. Conrad

Opinions are MINE, not my employer's -- Hedengren, in Finland.