Open Sauce Software
Tasty titbits from people using Linux and other open source software in business.
Monday 29 October 2007, 4:02 PM
Linux server market sagging?
Here's some interesting market research. IDC says that Linux is losing market share to Windows, on x86 servers in the US.
What's more, it's a sudden change, with the Linux annual growth going from +53 percent in 2003, to -6 percent in 2006, (reported in eWeek) while Windows server figures continue to grow. That sounds pretty drastic, doesn’t it?
It may be that there's no need to panic. The fast growth rates were due to migration from Unix to Linux, according to IDC. That was a no-brainer, it happened fast, and the easy part of that migration is . And apparently that is pretty much all done now. There's only a few SCO and UnixWare holdouts, while everyone else has made the sensible move.
But there's an even bigger consideration. Linux today, points out that IDC is tracking newly-shipped systems, where the software is bundled with hardware, and most Linux isn't shipped that way. It's installed on existing - and probably recycled - hardware.
So, panic over? Well, I don't know.
Windows had about half the server operating system market in 2000, and that's gone up to about 70 percent, Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions for AMD told eWeek. She reckons Linux has around 20 percent share, Unix is less than 20 percent and Netware doesn't register. Now, I'm guessing that's subject to the same problems as the IDC figure -- coming from AMD, it's pretty much bound to be tied to hardware sales.
But I'd have thought it was pretty important for Linux to be on new hardware that goes out to users. The underlying message seems to be that on those new systems, Linux still doesn't compete with Windows, but only competes with lame old Unix.
Shouldn't that be cause for concern?
PreviousComments on this post
I wonder if there is a means to determine if the servers that are going out are ones that have software installed on them or not. Most server dealers and OEMs will sell you a system WITHOUT an OS. You don't have to buy one at all if that is your wish (at least in the US the systems don't have to have an OS, unless that's the deal the company made with MS).
It would also be interesting to see if the servers that do go out with an OS installed on them still have the OS installed 6 weeks after reaching the end user. Our IS/IT department bought a server with Windows 2003 disk, dropped the disk onto a shelf and installed Linux on the system. We're running Apache, Subversion, Samba and a couple of other developer-related packages on it. Its been running fine for over a year now.
If nothing else, we could safely assume that any server shipped without an OS will be used to run Linux (or conceivably used with one of those windows server disks like the one you put on the shelf).
