[Sussex] Linux adoption news

[Geoff Teale]

Afternoon,

A couple of interesting things I saw this afternoon.

Firstly, the Economist has an opinion piece that follows on from Larry
Ellison (Oracle's lost-the-plot-psychopathic CEO) claiming that Microsoft
was in danger of being "wiped off the face of the earth" by Linux.  

The economist correctly assumes that Mr. Ellison's claims are not those of a
rational, unbiased man (considering that his confessed lifes ambition is to
acquire some missles to fit his MIG 21 (yes, he owns and flies one) and fire
them into Bill Gate's office whilst he is in it).  However, this at least
triggered them to note, that amongst the traditional big player in IT, the
promotion of LINUX splits the industry into winners and loosers - i.e., only
those companies that promoted LINUX or supported LINUX did well.  Companies
like SUN are obvious loosers here, IBM and HP are obvious winners.

The second thing I saw is that some people did some actual field research in
Australia (instead of the usual postulating) and discovered that there are a
number of companies either using or in the middle of moving to Linux systems
on their desktops.  This backs up both Red Hat and SuSE's claims that they
have been selling a lot more linux desktop installations to businesses over
the last year.  Whilst the numbers are not large, they are significant and
point towards a world desktop Linux userbase that exceeds Apple's market
share.  The situation now for Linux on the desktop is about the same as
Linux on servers in 1998.  Something tells me Linux desktop adoption is a
harder fight than server adoption ever was.

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

"An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you."
-- Dylan Thomas


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