Who Uses Linux? We All Do!

I was just reading an article over at LinuxPlanet that I found interesting and I thought I would share with you. The articles actual deals with who uses Linux and comes up with a very creative theory to show that we are all Linux users.

If you are a Google users you use Linux. How about Facebook? They also use Linux so if you use Facebook you are in theory a Linux user. The list of companies and web sites that actually use Linux is quite extensive. But the basic premise is that we are all Linux users even when we don’t rea;ize that Linux is in our life.

The article also states that:

By this yard-stick, everyone on the planet who uses the Internet is a Linux user. While certainly true, it is only one way of measuring Linux use. The major analysis firms that track operating system use, Gartner and IDC, focus on the server market. Their numbers ‘indicate’ that Linux is a powerful player in the server market, but their research doesn’t translate well into giving us an actual number of Linux servers. Gartner, of late, tends to focus on server hardware sales. So, while we know that IBM and HP both sell Linux-powered servers, Gartner’s data doesn’t easily tell us how many of those systems are shipping running Linux. IDC, on the other hand, tends to look at the overall cash value of server sales. That’s valuable information, but, since Linux tends to be the cheapest server operating system offering, this methodology also under-represents Linux’s impact on IT.

In both cases, the big two research firms are only looking at server sales. They’re not looking at what IT departments are actually running in their server rooms. In my own consulting experience, most of the SMB (small-to-medium sized businesses) use re-purposed x86 desktops and servers to run Linux.

This is an interesting theory and one that could be proved just how popular Linux has become when compared to Windows. This could explain why Microsoft doesn’t like Google. LOL

Comments welcome.

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