Could this be an April Fool’s Day trick? Nope, Oracle really does believe that Linux will ‘outstrip’ Windows in the long haul. To be honest and with much love for Linux, I will have to strongly disagree that it will ever surpass the Windows foothold unless Windows ceases to exist.

Over the next five years, Oracle is predicting annual growth of 12 percent for the open source OS

Linux adoptions are to grow in the next three to five years at nearly triple the rate of Windows, according to Oracle.

In an interview at the LinuxWorld conference in Sydney, the database company suggested Linux deployments had grown beyond an adoption phase, and were now becoming ubiquitous in small and large businesses alike.

Monica Kumar, director of Oracle’s Linux programme office, pointed to the open source operating system becoming mainstream as “businesses are looking to Linux as a way to save money,” and quotes a projected annual growth rate of 11.7 percent over the next five years. The software heavyweight claims analysts project Windows’ growth over the same period as being 3.6 percent per year. Source: UK Builder

[tags]sydney,linux growth,linuxworld,projected annual growth,open source os[/tags]