05.19.08
All-time High for GNU/Linux: 44.6% Market Share
…So says AWStats, based on Boycott Novell’s logs for May 2008
Occasionally, some statistics of ours are shared in order for readers to realise that the market share lie is caused by total neglect of niche sites — namely Web sites that attract certain types of audience and will never ever share their logs to support some peripheral ’studies’. The title was chosen to be an eye-catcher, but it’s true that it’s an all-time high for us.
Like a few other sites that could be named as extremely conscious about visitors’ privacy (they won’t even include user-targeted scripts because of that), we never will expose any personal data. In fact, the logs get flushed every night, so there’s no trace of them (only visual summaries remain). In any event, so far this month we’ve seen a very high volume of surfers whose operating system is identified (for certain) as “Linux”. To give you the breakdown by distribution:
- Ubuntu: 7.4 %
- Suse: 4.3 %
- Fedora: 3.7 %
- Debian: 3.6 %
- Mandriva: 0.8 %
- Red Hat: 0.2 %
- Centos: 0.1 %
- GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution): 24%
We still opine that a Big Lie is being spread whenever some Web statistics are selectively gathered, commissioned, generated and then published to suggest low ‘market share’ (installed based) for GNU/Linux. The population considered in the studies is biased, even if not deliberately so. █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
Ball_Mer said,
May 19, 2008 at 5:15 am
This site made it to distrowatch.com weekly news !!
Roy Schestowitz said,
May 19, 2008 at 5:23 am
Heh. Yes, we were there before. Ladislav also mentions Radu, who “will uncover any distribution that does not have a “source” directory on their FTP server.”
Very true. He’s extremely harsh. Didn’t he give ZenWalk a virtual slap and later praised Fedora for availability of source code? In any event, he scares a lot of developers because of his reviews. He even got Gael Duval nervous a couple of years back (Gael E-mailed to tell me).
ZiggyFish said,
May 19, 2008 at 7:10 am
nice to see Ubuntu number 1