Gartner Claims Less Linux Than IDC 227
Quite a few readers submitted news about a recent Gartner study which implies a far-lower-than-usually-supposed percentage of servers running GNU/Linux. Reader mfarver, for instance, writes: "Only 8.6 percent of servers shipped in 3rd quarter 2000 were running Linux, claims a recent Gartner Dataquest report. A previous study published by IDC estimated linux held about 24% of the server market share. Unsurprisingly the Gartner study was partially commissioned by Microsoft." Roblimo has penned an interesting piece up at NewsForge about why those numbers might smell a little funny. Hint: how many machines have you bought running any Free operating system from the get-go?
Shipped 'were' only includes pre-installed? (Score:1)
OTOH, much of the numbers rely on their definition of 'server' as hardware that was built as a server-grade system, not just any old PC pressed into service.
A company that is likely to cut corners and use Linux instead of a commercial OS is also likely to cut corners and use a commodity non-server-specific machine rather than buy a 'server-grade' hardware platform.
Re:the real world (Score:1)
Is that why you can't keep a job?
geekforhire
Perhaps you should spend less time fucking over some poor company's network and more time with your Playstation.
TRUTH (Score:1)
Re:Bullshit. (Score:1)
Left out our 32 servers running Linux (Score:2)
Some would argue that for such a large scale installation we should have vendor installed servers. But we found that we wanted a very customised solution, and without putting the vendor down, we felt that we had enough expertise within. At the end of the day we were in complete control.
I shouldn't be too worried about statistics, and I'm sure we weren't counted.
Re:Linux Counter? (Score:1)
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:1)
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:2)
If [Gartner] produces poor quality research on a regular basis, people will stop subscribing or purchasing its reports.
Logically, in a marketplace of informed, intelligent consumers, this makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, substitute "Microsoft" for "Gartner" and "software" for "research" and suddenly the apparently obvious, rational statement becomes a joke. I'm sure we can all name dozens more examples where obviously inferior products nevertheless generate substantial business.
I don't know whether Gartner's study or IDG's or Netcraft's or all or none are correct. And I really don't care. I don't choose my products based on market share. After all, isn't the whole point of Gartner that people will choose their research because they're well-known? If you apply the same standard to operating systems, what does that say about you?
Don't fret the small shit. Focus on quality. Every business that's successful over a long period of time worries about quality first. A company can succeed by raping customers for a limited length of time. Eventually it has to produce a product people actually want, or go away. IBM knows this all too well. Microsoft will learn it too. So move along, please; there's nothing to see here.
Re:Netcraft Statistics (Score:2)
Dear God, man. It's ok to point out that someone's wrong without being such an ass. Sure Apache runs on lots of different platforms - in fact, almost every major platform there is. It's also true that a large proportion of the sites using it are doing so on Linux. You probably figure they've been hyped into obvilion or that the low cost was attractive. The other poster probably just thinks that Linux is 31337.
So what? Linux is a very nice OS. It's unfortunate that it's mostly used on a decisively inferior hardware platform that effectively limits scalability, performance, and reliability to a few times that of the best Microsoft products. Can you do better than Linux on a peecee? Of course. Can you do better than $FOO on $BAR? Of course. You just have to spend more money. I've used all those "actual enterprise OSs" and I've adminned them, deployed them, and helped people make money with them. Frankly, I'm not real impressed. The only Unix I'd ever recommend over Linux is Irix, simply because nothing else will run on the beautiful purple monsters SGI makes. If you don't need those monsters, you can do just fine with a Sun running Linux. Choose the hardware you'd want if you were to run Solaris, then buy two models down for equal performance.
But I digress. Use what you like, but don't insult my choice of systems just because it's the same as that of someone who can't justify his.
Leave the PHBs to do their thing (Score:3)
What's the point? The point is that this community was already a vibrant, rapidly expanding one well before anyone decided it was the Next Big Thing. Long before you could read about it in the New York Times. Long before Slashdot became what is is now. Long, long before would-be nerds pondered the latest market figures for Linux-based systems from the Gartner Group and IDG.
Let the PHBs be. The community will survive and prosper with or without them. If everyone who only uses Linux or Free Software altogether because of advertising, press releases, support of large corporations, or mainstream media attention stopped using it right now, what would we lose? Well, a few fine folks would lose their jobs. At least one or two more "Linux vendors" would probably close up shop - but that's likely to happen anyway as part of a much broader downturn. Our market, if we cared to measure it, might shrink by 30% or 40% or even 70%. The software would not vanish from FTP sites - at least, not from all of them. The sources would not go away or suddenly become closed. And if I had to wager, I'd suggest many of the people no longer paid to hack this stuff would still spend time on it. In short, things would - and will - go on as they always have. The bubble was just that. You'll see it years from now as a spike in the plot of market share with respect to time. But don't worry the spikes or the valleys, watch the long-term trend. That trend has been toward a very high-quality set of products enjoyed by more people for a long time.
Forget Gartner, forget IDG, and forget the silly people who think they matter. Step back and look at what you're running today, and enjoy the fact that, all the negative press notwithstanding, you've got Free licenses that never expire for some damn fine software. Relax, and go outside for a breath of fresh air, lest the flames ruin your good mood.
Re:Study automaticly bies (Score:3)
It is true that the usefulness of Linux diminishes at the very high end. But in the realm we're talking about, nobody even thinks about NT. In fact, NT's usefulness is minimal (even by comparison with some NT "base") in midrange servers and nonexistent at the high end. The hardware NT (and x86 Linux) support tops out in the lower midrange of servers. A maximal 8-CPU peecee is a minnow in a school of sharks. At least Linux gives you an option to move beyond the limits of the peecee - an option NT once offered but no longer does.
No, toward the high end you see things like Irix and AIX and MVS and OS/400. Definitely not NT. But that doesn't mean the numbers aren't meaningless; they most certainly are.
Re:Think about this... (Score:4)
I don't know about you, but I would find it very difficult if not impossible to pick up meaningful experience in a world in which there is little relation between action and consequence. Two people can do the same thing on two identical Microsoft systems and get completely different results. More interestingly, you can do the same thing twice on the same box and get different results. Most maddening of all, you can do something, then reverse it, and end up in a different spot than the one at which you started. This kind of environment is not conducive to the type of learning that really good admins go through. There's actually a nicely similar situation discussed in Carl Sagan's Cosmos - he argues that if there were no rules of physics, science would be impossible because we could never learn by experimentation, and no experiment could ever be duplicated.
This entire idea, in fact, also skirts very closely the Monkey Rule. Specifically, a monkey can never be a good systems administrator. Sure, he can handle the common cases and push the right buttons if he's well enough trained, but the moment something out of the ordinary happens it's all over. At the risk of sounding disrespectful, I'd suggest that your 16-year-old sister most likely suffers from the exact same problem. So, no, I wouldn't likely pay her my salary for doing my job, and I'd hope no manager would either. It's not just that you need more admins to manage a dodgy infrastructure. It's back to Brooks: 5 people are not always better than one. Especially if those 5 people don't or can't contribute anything to the solution. Are there managers who've never read Brooks? Surely. They don't last long.
Re:TRUTH (Score:1)
Actually, where I work, we've bought 4 Dell 2450's and 2 2550's preloaded with Linux so far. Granted, I still rebuild it from scratch... Aside from preferring to install it myself, they also won't set it up as a Raid10 from the factory.
You can't trust Dell to do what you ask in any case. Where I work we're about half-and-half MacOS and Windows with our lone unix server (MacOS X Server) handling most of our intranet server needs (we're not a big shop.) I order all our Windows machines from Dell. When we were using NT, I would always specify "Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 5 on NTFS". What did I always get? A two-partition setup: partition 1, with the OS on it, was always FAT and partition 2, which usually had some apps like office, was NTFS. A lot of good this does me. The first time this happened I actually (naive, oh so naive) called Dell and told them they had obviously done it wrong. I explained that what I expected to get was one partition using NTFS that spanned the entire disk. They responded, of course, that they couldn't do that, as NT 4.0 SP1 (which is what the boot CDROM that came with the computer was) couldn't make NTFS partitions larger than 2GB, you needed to have NT 4.0 SP3 or higher installed to do that. No matter, I always reformat & do it myself anyway.
Now that I order new Windows machines with Win2000 Pro on them, always specifying "Windows 2000 Pro on NTFS", expecting that we would get a machine with a single NTFS partition, what do we get? FAT32, thank you very much. Oh well, I always reformat anyway, to get rid of the extra cruft Dell installs.
Yep. (Score:2)
:)
hawk, wondering what good a system with nothing but the linux kernel and ghe GNU utilities would be, anyway . . .
The basis of statistics... (Score:2)
Whereas the IDC numbers were "extrapolated" with some pretty wild assumptions. I recall reading that they just automatically made the assumption that every copy being purchased or downloaded was installed to 15 machines. How can you know that?
There is also an issue of what's the point of these numbers. Looking at marketshare tends to ignore installed base figures so I assume that the point is to show what is growing, where the market is moving... i.e. where the money is.
As such, I think Gartner raises a very valid point that a Linux install that doesn't have some sort of support contract going along with it, says "what's the point?" Gartner points out that not many companies are going to do something like that anyway.
But more importantly, if the installs aren't being accompanied by support contracts, then they really don't play a part in accounting for "where the money is".
If the money isn't there, it's not useful for someone like RedHat to show market share growth. At least not to encourage investment, maybe to get warm fuzzies.
It's all relative. Honestly, from what I've read the Gartner numbers are much more supportable by facts. The IDC numbers appear to have a tint of "I pulled this out of my ass monday morning because we wanted a headline."
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:2)
My boss has a Gartner account, and I'll have to try to get access to the real study.
Re:Pre-installations were not involved in the numb (Score:2)
Re:Pre-installations were not involved in the numb (Score:2)
This is pure unadulterated FUD. Beta XP shipped with an MP3 encoder to test the ability to plug other audio encoders into Windows Media Player. The encoder they shipped was limited to 56kbps because that is the limit before you have to license the technology from Fraunhoffer. The latest XP builds do not include an MP3 encoder, and there was never any plans to ship with one. Windows Media has never had this ability, but they wanted to allow for third parties to extend the product in such a way.
#2. Breaks CD Burner Software.
I don't know the specifics. But given every Windows upgrade known to man has broken CD Burner software it does not surprise me. This is because CD Burner software still tries to operate at a low-level API. I don't know why they can't standardize on a device driver API, but Roxio, et al does seem to want to do that.
#3. Prevents you from upgrading your computer.
It's unclear at this point the details. I'll give you this point.
#4. Requires activation. Requires giving out info.
Point #1 is true, Point #2 is FUD. The activation does not require giving out personal information unless you choose to register your product at the same time.
#5. Is a very MINOR technical upgrade from Win2k.
Well this is true, but Windows XP is designed as an upgrade from Win95/98/Me, and in that case is a very MAJOR technical upgrade. Again this point is FUD.
#6. Has a GUI that would make anyone outside Miss Shirley's Romper Room throw up.
One of the benefits of growing up in Chicago was being able to see Romper Room and Bozo live. So perhaps I've been warped by those shows, but honestly having worked with the WinXP beta I think the GUI is pretty nice. Sorry, I'll have to call this FUD as well since it's obvious you haven't used it.
Well so far it seems the score for your post is:
Fear Uncertainty Doubt: 4
Insightful Opinion: 1
Pointing out the Obvious: 2
Not bad for one day of trolling.
Re:Think about this... (Score:2)
Actually that's not true.
"And you can pay 5 of those newbie admins for the price of one unix admin."
Either is that.
", I think if you want to run a windows server, you'll need the extra admins to take care of the additional crashes and glitches, "
Is there some sort of three strikes rule?
Re:This isant what you think (Score:2)
The 8.6% sounds more likely.
Gartner says water is wet (0.8 probability) (Score:2)
Gartner has a long and glorious history of being a shill for MS and for the patently stupid. For chrissakes they invest in the companies they "study" and the managing directors also sit on the board of a VC firm that pours money into IPO companies that have "new and amazing technology on the brink of greatness !!!!"
And even if they weren't unethical criminals how often have the actually been right? Um....I'd say about a 0.15 probablity so to say or about 1 in 7.
Re:Lets talk about "recycled" servers (Score:2)
I'm sure we beat MS in recycled servers by a wide margin, though.
When are these guys going to learn? (Score:2)
Gartner, IDG, et. al.: It doesn't matter how many are shipped with Linux pre-installed. To count market share that way omits all the copies of Red Hat, Suse, etc., that are purchased directly from the distribution manufacturers and then installed on gawd-only-knows how many computers. I know... I purchased one copy of a distribution and installed it on at least ten systems. I don't know on how many computers that copy of the distribution was installed by the people that borrowed the CDs from me. Let's not even get into the number of systems out there running Linux that was installed from a CD burned from a downloaded ISO image.
Get off the idea that market share is tied to pre-installations. Please. You just look stupid in the eyes of the people who will, someday, be running IT shops. Those people will remember your faulty methodology and look elsewhere when they want to do industry research. Your expensive reports will merely gather dust on the shelf.
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Re:Probably about right for MARKET share (Score:2)
A few weeks ago it was reported here that Red Hat is very close too.
If that is correct, I don't think either is going belly-up any time soon.
Re:Around here... (Score:2)
So there!
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Study automaticly bies (Score:2)
The problem is what the study is.
In effect they are counting the amount of preinstalls. Linux is mostly installed after market. Windows is mostly preinstalled. So Windows is automaticly going to show up the better.
Also Windows requirements increase over time forcing new machine sales just to use the latest updates. Linux requirements don't incrase so Linux sales only relfect the need for better hardware.
At most maybe Gartner set a higher standard for "server" than IDG did.. Linux usefulness starts to fall off at a certen point on the high end so sales of extreamly high end is likely to be Windows NT only.
The reality is however that for Linux a 386 is a server but to Windows nothing less than a Pentium Pro.
But you can only mesure "server" by CPU power. But what makes it a server is the intended use. That is an unknown.
A bunch of Win 2K server boxes sold could be for workstations or game machines. A bunch of the Linux servers in the sample could be destend for a Beowolf cluster.
It's a self poisoning servey...
I would presume to say that Linux is under represented. But being truthful... Linux could also be over represented.
It is a random number of no meaning.
Re:Ok... (Score:2)
Depends.. (Score:2)
Seeing as the report indicates that PURCHASES of linux are down, that shouldn't affect your decision to BUY, given that you understand that the raw number of purchases in no way indicates a) popularity and b) (by a fairly flawed populist metric) stability/suitability.
However, if you are a VENDOR, then all you care about is net profit anyway, and you don't care whether Linux or Windows is *installed*. You ONLY care about how much money is *spent* on them. If you are a VENDOR you LIKE large TCO as long as the resources spent on that big TCO are going to you.
Microsoft commisioned this report as a VENDOR, but released it with the hopes that it will discourage VENDORS as well as BUYERS to avoid Linux.
Everybody is so busy whining about the Gartner vs IDC numbers that they are failing to see the forest for the trees.
Re:Slashdot should not assume its readers are MORO (Score:2)
Respected maybe, but clueless all the same. Gartner has a long track record of "predicting" for next year exactly the stats that others found for last year. I haven't seen their secret business methods, but I rather suspect that they just collect whatever stats they can get (which will in general reflect what was happening a year ago), change "stats" to "predictions", and sell it to gullible managers... like you.
> To claim this is biased because Microsoft funded it is absolutely ridiculous.
Or not. MS habitually funds studies with a little string attached, which says "You cannot publish the results of this study without our approval."
That doesn't result in an accurate view of what's going on in the world. In fact, it's essentially identical to the "science" practiced by dishonest or self-deluded paranormal researchers, who publish their result from trials when they get lucky, and ignore the results of unlucky trials on the grounds that "the force wasn't with me today".
This kind of thing makes it really easy for people to justify believing whatever they want to believe... whether they be paranormal researchers or corporate managers.
> When my corporation pays for research, we absolutely do not want them to tell us what we want to hear.
I've worked for a number of corporations, and never once met a manager who wouldn't tune out what he didn't want to hear. Most would only pay for information that furthers their careers; anyone who staked his career on converting his company's Sun boxes to Windows boxes will be more than happy to pay for this particular report.
> W2K IS a serious Enterprise-ready scaleable and reliable OS.
Gosh, I'm down to posting a link to the Hot 100 analysis almost once a week anymore. I'll let you find it yourself this time: go to groups.google.com and search comp.os.linux.advocacy for "hot 100 uptimes", and read what you find. Or do a new analysis yourself, and post your results for us.
> Just because Microsoft commissioned the research does not render it invalid.
Repeating it over and over might make you feel better about the money you wasted on the report, but repeating it will not make it come true.
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MS isn't all evil, but you aren't making a single (Score:2)
Now, not all of MS is evil, a portion of thier business practices are very questionable, and when you are as big as MS is you get generalizations. Look at how many people hated IBM (Big Blue) when they were on top. If you want to break down and find out what's good about MS, go take a look at thier hardware, I'm sititng in front of an original MS Natural keyboard (with the full size keys and the lift in the front, none of that Elite crap) and a MS Intellimouse Pro. It's excellent hardware. Look at the games the MS has published (note published and not developed) such as Age of Empires and Asherons Call. Whoever is running publishing appears to know what they are doing.
I think I'm just arguing that yes, MS isn't all evil. However your post doesn't point to those things. Ease of use isn't one of them, and even if it was they stole it from Apple which can be considered evil.
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:3)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2)
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/
Re:We need a FUD log (Score:2)
Re:Think about this... (Score:2)
I would suggest this to everybody. Go dig around the net and gather all comments from MS executives about how much Java programmers cost or how much Unix Admins cost and then go visit a high school. You can make a huge difference in someones life.
Re:NT "Cost Efficiency" (Score:2)
Probably about right for MARKET share (Score:2)
Thanks to the wonder of open source software, it doesn't really matter if 75% of the actual machines are running Linux (and most machines running Linux are probably assumed to be servers), if they are all downloads with no support contract then Red Hat, Mandrake and the others are still going to eventually run out of cash and go belly up.
What these numbers from IDC and Gartner are essentially saying is that Linux itself may be Red Hat's biggest competitor. If RH is only getting 10% to 15% of the money coming back to it then they are most likely being cut off by the very free (beer) nature of the GPL that allows you to install as many times as you like.
The other interesting thing from the ZDNet article is that no numbers for NT/2000 were mentioned from the Gartner study. I wonder what the split really was among the other operating systems?
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:5)
Three points.
As has already been stated, Gartner asked end-users what they installed on their computers after they bought them. Not what was pre-installed on their computer. Implication: either Linux doesn't have the marketshare zealots want to belive, or accurately assessing server marketshare is difficult. You decide.
Garter is a research agency that has its value locked in its reputation. If it produces poor quality research on a regular basis, people will stop subscribing or purchasing its reports. Short term gains (ie fabricating truths in reports for specific companies) will lead to long term losses (ie loss of reputation leading to loss of credibility and revenue). Are you arrogant enough to believe they haven't thought of this? The reality is, they analysed the information available to them and made the best, least biased forecast as they could.
Garter is not in the business of assessing obscure technical facts. They provide a strategic business perspective on technology. Tech-heads are not their market. They don't care about the operational aspects of the technology. The people who run business (which, most commonly, are not tech-heads and have different skills) are their market. They care about the strategic implications of the technology and longer-term market trends.
You think you could do a better job and produce higher quality research? Don't whinge - go out and do it. If you produce research of such a high calibre, you'll drive Gartner out of business in months. I'm constantly amazed at how many people on Slashdot are willing to spout off on things they know nothing about. I don't tell people how to fly a plane - I realise I don't know how. But, the village idiots on slashdot are always willing to provide legal advice, assume everyone in management is a PHB, that companies never ever know what they're doing, that everything is part of a conspiracy and that anyone who doesn't know how to write a sound compression script using bash is an idiot. On the other hand, some people here have some seriously big clues. You my friend, are not one.
In summary, read the bloody report and get some perspective before spouting off.
easy answer (Score:2)
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
$echo your welcome
means NT as the OS, since win2k runs IIS 5.0 afaik.
absurd (Score:2)
Then there's the homebuilt faction, and I'm sure a hugely disproportionate number of linux servers as opposed to windows boxes are made from mobo's and CPU's.
This is a textbook example of how not to do statistics.
Thanks MS.
Re:My server Runs linux (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Pre-installations were not involved in the numbers (Score:5)
Respondents were screened to ensure they were knowledgeable about server purchases over the quarter, and they were asked what percentage of their server purchases were Linux servers, he said.
"We went to end users, rather than looking at just sales numbers, and asked them what servers they had bought over the past three months and what operating system they had installed on it over the same period," Hewitt said. "There was no question about whether Linux was preinstalled or not, we simply asked about new shipments and this is what we found."
Just Microsoft is involved does not necessarily mean the numbers are bad. It is hard to say.
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:2)
Being so involved with high and midrange servers, I was very suprised that IDC claimed 24% of servershare belongs to Linux. With all due respect, and indeed acknovledging that Linux does have it's functions in corporate networks, I believe that Gartner's figure is much closer to reality.
My 0.02, anyway.
Ah well, it's more fud. (Score:2)
Netcraft is probably the best data we have on this, but even that is lacking.
Just ignore any information pertaining to the number of Linux installs, it is all just guesstimations, and yes that includes information that makes Linux installs look good.
Ok... (Score:2)
Wow, news flash!
The "duh" factor here is astounding.
All this tells me... (Score:2)
What's really important isn't what numbers linux is doing now, but what it's going to be doing in the future.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Linux Counter? (Score:2)
Re:Newton's law of slashdot posting (Score:4)
That's because only extreme viewpoints gain karma. I usually post on both sides of the fence for anything MS/Linux, and then watch them *both* get modded up.
What's a PHB to do? (Score:2)
The real danger here is that some corporate manager will see this headline snippet, and react with something like:
"I knew this was a passing fad. Those geeks in tech don't know what they're talking about," etc.
Despite the misleading nature of these numbers, too many statistics like this will eventually add up to too many setbacks, and less acceptance. It's amazing the amount of people out there that have not idea when it comes to computers, but they want to believe that they do.
MotoMannequin
Re:Who buys systems? (Score:2)
The shit you (and I) glue together from random spare parts aren't servers. The surplus PCs and sparc workstations lying around aren't servers.
If you're running mission critical apps/services on these machines, you're in trouble. Call me when you go bankrupt.
24% Ho ho ho!!! (Score:2)
From where I sit, as a professional Unix consultant, I see roughly 1-2% of "servers" being linux boxes, and even that's stretching the truth a bit. What are they calling a server here--any machine that runs DHCP?
I suspect that their definition of server is just as valid as defining a mainframe as anything that can cranks out "x" MIPS. It just ain't right!
One point. (Score:2)
But this is about the Gartner group. The whole point about this thread is the credibility of this so-called leader in marketting research. You cannot prove a point here by pleading to that credibility. That would be circular reasoning.
So keep your mind open, and listen to the slashdot crowd for once. They are the ones who have to live with the consequences of purchasing decisions made by management.
NT "Cost Efficiency" (Score:3)
I've administered both NT and Unix platforms (including the pricey proprietary ones). Unix wins on TCO, in my expereience, and it's no contest if it's x86 hardware unix.
Why? Business requires a certain minimum level of functionality from their servers, some level such that the temptation to go back to paper and pencils isn't a factor, which varies from business to business and from usage to usage. In order to reliably meet a given level of functionality (performance or stability), I have found that pretty much without fail NT required more machines and more powerful machines (== more expensive machines) to meet that limit than Unix did. More machines means more admins. More machines and more admins mean more cost.
This is not to say that NT goes down every five minutes. But in order to keep one NT server up even approximately as long as a Unix machine, I find that I must restrict it to doing just one service at a time (i.e. just mail, or just file serving, or just web, or just DB, etc.); whereas on a Unix machine I can frequently roll several services onto one machine with no significant drop in performance or reliability.
I am not an Open Source zealot. I am a pragmatist, and I only evaluate the tools I use based on how well they meet my or my client's needs. Microsoft simply does not provide good tools to run mission-critical services on, however "cost effective" they may be.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org [geekaustin.org]
Here's another survey: (Score:3)
Not that this fact is particularly relevant, because perhaps the hosting locations that use Windows don't make the top 50 uptime slots. Seriously, though, what I'm pointing out is that there are a number of ways to skin this cat: IDG and Gartner have two different assessments, and I have a third. It wouldn't surprise me if we are all correct.
What the living fuck? (Score:2)
They use the world "methodology", and then have a paragraph that doesn't describe their methodology at all. They neglect to mention what their questions were, or how they selected respondents, or what the completion rate was, or what any of the results might have been. They say "Respondents were asked what percentage of their server purchases consisted of Linux servers." If that's what they asked, then how the hell did they get "percentage of redhat", or the total dollar value of the servers? If it's not what they asked, then why the hell won't they tell us what the did fucking ask?
The whole thing is a crock of steaming fetid shit, and anyone with an IQ over 95 would know it if they read it. The very best way to live up to the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" bullshit is to publish dick like this, where you refuse to say how the study was conducted (or even what, precisely, you were studying), and then cherry-pick a limited subset of the results. It stinks, and everyone at the Gartner Group knows it stinks, and they'll all go to hell for being such weaselicious fucks.
Oh, yeah... THAT Gartner Group... (Score:5)
Re:Slashdot should not assume its readers are MORO (Score:2)
You do realize of course that there is a diffrence between a computer being on for a long time and it's opperating system being "W2K IS a serious Enterprise-ready scaleable and reliable OS." -- I mean, those uptimes are like 5 years. How the hell is a 2 year OS going to be able to beat that?
Lies, damn lies, and statistics (Score:2)
And that's the big problem with statistical studies -- surely there are plenty of Linux servers running under the table that no survey is going to find because the techies' boss doesn't even know about it. Web servers? Okay, that's publicly accessible stuff, but only a small fraction of the server market.
What I find especially interesting, though, is that as slanted and pointless as the survey is, it still works in Tux's favor over the long run, at least a little bit...
/Brian
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:2)
Re:Left out our 32 servers running Linux (Score:2)
We're vaguely thinking about a support contract to cover the day when the knowledgable person is out the office [me], especially as they don't cost much compared to NT Server.
Re:Who buys systems? (Score:2)
We glued two old desktops together, installed linux + radiusd on both of them and wrote some easy admin tools. Then we deployed them. We're aiming to get automatic failover going between them too. Radius is mission critcal to us.
Why are these machines not servers, and why would it have been more cost effective for us to have bought two new machines to do this?
Re:Newton's law of slashdot posting (Score:2)
Re:Oh, yeah... THAT Gartner Group... (Score:2)
It was very PHB friendly, full of graphs and tables comparing various aspects of TCO - average number of users per admin, number of users per server and so on. I've no idea where the figures actually came from.
I've distrusted Gartner ever since.
Think about this... (Score:3)
How many Windows system admins are there in the world? What is their pay range?
Lets face it, my 16 year old sister can learn to be a windows admin from one of those tech schools that'll make you certified in 3 months. And you can pay 5 of those newbie admins for the price of one unix admin.
Its not that I enjoy these numbers. Honestly, I think if you want to run a windows server, you'll need the extra admins to take care of the additional crashes and glitches, so it isn't cost efficient. But John Q. Manager doesn't know that. Such is life.
Re:NT "Cost Efficiency" (Score:2)
You've got to be kidding me. What administrator would risk their PDC for the IIS vulnerability of the week/month? I think you're forgetting that something like 70% of cracks/hacks/security breaches are done by current/former employees.
If everyone followed that WU-FTP, BIND, Apache, etc., would all run on separate servers, so this whole argument would be moot.
In a previous post, you mentioned that being able to stick all these services on 1 or 2 boxes because the load on them wasn't very high. At the risk of sounding like a zealot, with the money saved on licensing, an Open Source solution would allow you to invest that money in another two or three boxes, which would allow you to spread out the services like you should.
If you think software/hardware is costly, then run the numbers on stopping the work of an entire company dead in its tracks because a disgruntled employee exploited an unpatched IIS Unicode vulnerability on your PDC/web/ftp/file server (let's go ahead and format the shared drive while we're at it--we've got a remote shell, after all; just to make sure we make the end-user impact measured in days/weeks of lost time)
Whatever OS/apps you choose, the services *must* be segregated to separate boxes to reduce the risk of harmful 'interactions' and to spread the risk associated with hardware failure. An admin who fails to do so is just being negligent. If an admin is being forced to do so by mgmt, then the admin has failed to properly present the risk/rewards of current scenario to management.
Stephen
Re:The basis of statistics... (Score:2)
But more importantly, if the installs aren't being accompanied by support contracts, then they really don't play a part in accounting for "where the money is".
On the other hand, a valid issue is "where the money isn't", ie, what money is MS missing out on. In that case the lack of support contracts is unimportant.
In general Linux gives the user much greater opportunity to do their own support, which is what my company does. This is a problem for RedHat as much as it is for MS but it's not a problem for those of us using Linux as their server platform. We've got the source code!
TWW
Re:Pre-installations were not involved in the numb (Score:2)
Could be nice avocacy material.
An Alternate Study? (Score:2)
I am sure it would be damning.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip
Re:Pre-installations were not involved in the numb (Score:4)
"While I accept my results may not include some desktop and workstations configured as Linux servers, I simply do not believe that Linux is shipping on 25 percent or more of all new servers and I just cannot believe the IDC figures," Hewitt said. "They are simply pushing the envelope and overstating what the operating system is actually doing."
If the majority of customers got their Linux via download or some other way, "then the market is in even worse shape than my survey shows," he said. "How many support contracts are vendors going to get from those customers? I have already told Red Hat that they are stretching the numbers they put out to the marketplace, which resulted in a very lively debate."
These paragraphs seems to imply that he was looking for what OS the machines were shipping with. And accepting that if the 25% of all servers are running Linux (i.e. the IDC study is correct), then those customers aren't buying support contracts.
The wording of the article is confused. What you quoted makes it sound as if they were looking at what OS servers bought in the past three months are running. What I quoted makes it sound like they wanted to know OS the server shipped with.
Can anyone make sense of this?
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:2)
Which is precisely why I don't subscribe. Crappy research ("Paper airplane portals will be a $2B market by 2004.") Waste of money!
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:2)
Amen! I bet some investors in a wide range of dot-coms and "enterprise B2B exchange portal" thingies [fuckedcompany.com] would love to find the guy who wrote that these would be multi-billion dollar markets by now...
This isant what you think (Score:2)
NOOOOO this isant another instance of making statistics show what you want.. this is another instance of a
For Instance...
Only 8.6 percent of servers shipped in 3rd quarter 2000 were running Linux, claims a recent Gartner Dataquest report. A previous study published by IDC estimated linux held about 24% of the server market share. Unsurprisingly the Gartner study was partially commissioned by Microsoft
It says 8.6% of servers SHIPPED... that is wholly different then 24% RUNNING linux, as would be in stated SERVER MARKET SHARE.
The
Hmmmm (Score:3)
Re:Those in the middle (Score:2)
Re:Ok... (Score:2)
But on the other hand, the real news is that 8.6% of all new servers sold comes with Linux pre-installed.
This is in fact good news. Its only the spindoctoring in the Gartner study that makes it look either bad or not newsworthy.
Is having MORE servers with your OS really better? (Score:5)
Are corporations buying more Windows servers than Linux servers? Yes. Are corporations buying more Windows licenses than using free software? Yes. Are corporations buying more MS support contracts than Linux support? Yes. Do the majority of corporations operate efficiently? Hell no. Are corporate decision-makers aware of the benefits of open source? Typically not.
Studies like this do nothing to prove or disprove the value of opensource. What I would like to see are comparisons of similar-sized companies that use either Windows or opensource... how do their server-farms compare? Who's more stable, more secure? Who's budget is lower? How much does each company spend on support, hardware, etc? How about some real side-by-side comparisons of real-life scenarios, rather than a guess of how many servers are out there?
Another thing - all of my servers were bought without Linux (some with no OS, some came with windows). I download distros and keep them on an FTP on my LAN. I install from that with the bootnet image. Even if Gartner asked the purchaser what the machines were intended to run, they would not have known and said windows since we are main an MS shop, except for my systems.
We need a FUD log (Score:4)
Methods they have used so far:
We should compile all this stuff and put it in a central location so that we can refer to it at a later time. I bet it wouldn't take long for all the inconsistencies in their arguments to fall apart, and it would make for great debate fodder.
Re:Slashdot should not assume its readers are MORO (Score:2)
Me read reports too, but me try write better.
Also: "When my corporation pays for research, we absolutely do not want them to tell us what we want to hear. We want to know the FACTS. Bill Gates (the world's most succesful businessman) is no different."
You're assuming Microsoft wants facts and not marketing crap to try to prop up W2K. You know, stuff marketing can put out alongside statements like "W2K IS a serious Enterprise-ready scaleable and reliable OS." Which might be true in comparison to LAN Manager, but not if it's up against UNIX.
Finally: "Just because Microsoft commissioned the research does not render it invalid."
Agreed. It does, however, render it highly suspect. That it's from Gartner renders it likely invalid. They haven't been trusted by any of the techies I know since about 1996 and even the sales types I know don't take them seriously anymore.
Bullshit. (Score:2)
The Garter group survives by some of the most flagrantly unethical (and in my opinion, criminal) tactics ever displayed even in an industry where such things are common. As for driving Garter out of business if you do better research... what utter nonsense! That is like saying that you will drive MS out of business if you produce a better OS. In an ideal world, maybe. Not in a world driven by greed and corruption where manipulating and managing the public perception of things has been reduced to a science.
Magnus.Re:Lets talk about "recycled" servers (Score:2)
Actually, I'm having trouble taking "that old machine in the corner" and loading Linux on it. Firsthand experience over the past month of reading, experimenting, and downloading distros has revealed that most 2000 and 2001 Linux distributions really don't work that well for old machines anymore. You can see it with Mandrake and others optimizing for 586 or even 686 processors now. You can see it in Debian 2.1 vs. 2.2 -- the memory requirements for 2.1 (1999) are 4 megs ram minimum (16 recommended), for 2.2 (2001) the minimum is 12 (64 recommended).
What I've found is for my older machines -- 486s, 586s, moderate amounts of RAM -- that I have to track down pre-2000 distributions, or settle for crippled distributions such as SmallLinux (very cool, can do X-Windows in 4 megs of RAM, but also states very clearly "this is not a complete distribution"). I think our convincing arguements about how good Linux is with old machines are becoming less convincing as older distributions become more obscured or drop off the Web entirely.
Links. (Score:3)
Here are some relevent links:
An Opinion from OsOpinion [osopinion.com]
The Gartner Report Itself [gartner.com]
--Volrath50
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2)
E.g. my company listed Linux in the evaluation process when starting new project, which is so amazing - our company never ever spend any resource on R&D and every adoption must be known technology and justified(read: have big corp. behind). The move is like seeing a dinosaur flying to us.
Our internal papers even positioned Linux as the midway between Win2k and commercial UNIX. It might not due to the increase in awareness of management, it might due to the budget consideration.
They solved budget problem, we are happy with Linux. It's a win-win situation for us.
(That's only one specific case for our corp., I didn't mean to generalize - in case you argue)
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:5)
As has already been stated, Gartner asked end-users what they installed on their computers after they bought them.
As one of a Gartner customers, we failed to get hold of the detail information on how they did the survey, they (inofficially) said it's commercial secret. All we know is the market segment and sample size. So, are you sure they really did?
Garter is a research agency that has its value locked in its reputation. If it produces poor quality research on a regular basis, people will stop subscribing or purchasing its reports.
Good point, but in fact customers choose Gartner because they want to get what they want to hear, and Gartner chooses who to list in their report. Once my friend's company complaint Gartner on their unfair comparison to their product. Their response was like "You were lucky we ever listed you" attitude. Gartner offered to come over to evaluate the situation, turn out gave them an opportunity to make business. My friend has then grown up thereafter any never take their study seriously.
Are you arrogant enough to believe they haven't thought of this?
Are you naive enough to believe they haven't thought of doing study in favour of big corps. for long term benefit?
Garter is not in the business of assessing obscure technical facts. They provide a strategic business perspective on technology. Tech-heads are not their market. They don't care about the operational aspects of the technology. The people who run business (which, most commonly, are not tech-heads and have different skills) are their market. They care about the strategic implications of the technology and longer-term market trends.
Hmm, isn't that exactly the major problem here?.....no wonder why they rated Rambus having brilliant future....
But, the village idiots on slashdot are always willing to provide legal advice, assume everyone in management is a PHB, that companies never ever know what they're doing, that everything is part of a conspiracy and that anyone who doesn't know how to write a sound compression script using bash is an idiot.
village idiots on slashdot? Compare to people like you who are so naive to believe that reports from big and rich companies must always be trusted, we are real idiots.
In summary, read the bloody report and get some perspective before spouting off.
I read those bloody reports quite frequently for my job. Have you ever wonder how do they come up with those probability factors that predict future trends on something, and how accurate do they turn out to be? I'd be much grateful if you could talk Gartner's to release the details, formula and source data of their research. (No Sir, it's company's secret!)
Re:Think about this... (Score:2)
Yes, but any 16 year old with a cable modem and a CD burner can download a copy of any Linux distro and have a REAL, robust, scalable server OS to play with, free of charge.
And Linux is getting easier and easier to use all the time.
Plus, Linux and Unix knowledge is WORTH more in the workplace than `Doze knowledge, which is a dime a dozen. I personally am considered very valueble in my department, in a top company that is investing a BILLION dollars in Linux, simply because I am a competent superuser. I'm not even good enough to be an engineer yet (but I'm working on it, and here in Durham, NC is a great place to do it).
Re:Ok... (Score:2)
But on the other hand, the real news is that 8.6% of all new servers sold comes with Linux pre-installed.
This is in fact good news. Its only the spindoctoring in the Gartner study that makes it look either bad or not newsworthy.
"
I think you make a great point there. Pretty much everyone who sells servers these days offers Linux. I work for one of the largest in Q/A testing, right now working on certifying their RAID cards and servers for Red Hat 7.1.
Linux is the ideal web server, and with SAMBA, an ideal file server for small and medium businesses. After all, connect ALL your users to it, no need to buy connect licenses... EVER!
Those categories represent, in raw numbers, the LARGEST bulk categories of the server market.
Re:Pre-installations were not involved in the numb (Score:2)
Really? As I recall, most
That is a good thing AOL does, for sure, if for no other reason than to help Mozilla is to hurt M$. Remember, the enemy of your enemy is your friend...
As for Microsoft, I make no apologies. They ARE evil. Just look at what `Doze XP is going to do to people who think they are buying the greatest thing since MS Sliced Bread(tm).
XP:
1. Deliberately hurts Mp3
2. Breaks CD Burner software
3. Prevents you from upgrading your computer in an unlimited fashion without calling M$.
4. REQUIRES activation (and giving out info) to be a legal license.
5. Is a very MINOR technical upgrade from Windows 2000, which given what XP is DOING to you in #1-4, makes it a negative return. 2000 is by far the better OS.
6. Has a GUI that would make anyone outside Miss Shirley's Romper Room throw up. I much prefer KDE 2.1.
Not only that, but MS is sending out goons to call the GPL license "Un American" and to lobby for what cannot be stated as anything but the right to "embrace and extend" ANYONE'S code.
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:2)
NOT true. Here's a quote:
""The study results indicated that in the traditional server market in the United States during the third quarter of 2000, 8.6 percent of server shipments were Linux-based systems."
So they did base it on SHIPMENTS. I'm willing to bet that most GNU/Linux servers ship with Windows, then are replaced with Linux. Also, this does not count hand built servers, of which I'd bet a large percentage are Linux servers.
As I said in my previous post, this "method" of determining how popular an OS is used by Gartner isn't any more scientific than determining the most popular video game by what cart/CD came with the system.
Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:5)
Many things on it were illogical, such as the blatant RAMBUS memory cheerleading, etc, despite benchmarks that proved that PC-133 SDRAM was faster on Pentium 3 systems than RAMBUS (and was cheaper).
Basically Gartner, like any company of it's type, says what it's paid to say. Why do they do this? Because they wanted to get paid. Remember when Ziff-Davis would only talk about Liuux when parroting Microsoft's "Haloween Documents"? That changed overnight when Linux companies formed and started advertising in ZD magazines.
The same will happen with Gartner when a Linux company buys their seal of approval.
As the article stated, this "study" used the flawed model of judging server OS's by what OS shipped with the system, rather than actually surveying what was actually USED on that server sold.
This is like measuring what radio station is #1 in the market by what station the radio was set to when it was sold. Or how many people buy Ashland Gasoline because that was the fuel in the car when it was sold...
Unfortunately, Gartner's flaws are not well known by the people who use them as the HOLY WRIT (usually the non-techical people in corporate and government bureaucracy).
Re:Slashdot should not assume its readers are MORO (Score:2)
Heh. Considering the rest of his post seemed non-trollish and mostly intelligent, I'm guessing that what he meant was support for XML in a standard way. It would be nice if Linux (*NIX in general) had one single standard library based on XML that was used for all *.conf type files. It really can be a pain editing different file types and doing things differently depending upon if the software you are configuring uses ':' to seperate keys from values, or ',' or something even more obscure.
Why you would want that support in the kernel, though.. well, its a bad idea. Perhaps the original poster assumes this will trojan horse the XML support into all distributions and then software programmers will be more likely to use the library...
Re:This isant what you think (Score:2)
Hopefully people who host their code at sourceforge will at least start making copious local backups in the event the site just disappears one day, along with VA Linux as a corporate entity.
If nothing else... (Score:2)
one other word (Score:2)
still runs VERY happy on a little 386/16mhz
of course *I'm* not happy with it ;)
Lets talk about "recycled" servers (Score:3)
Linux/GNU/FREEBSD is doing more to help "reduce/reuse/recycle"
Newton's law of slashdot posting (Score:5)
No doubt, within minutes, the board will be awash in criticisms of Slashdot's anti-microsoft stance and defences of that stance.
I've noticed a trend with regard to this process. No matter how passionately the stoical marketeers defend Microsoft, nor how predictably Linux' yes-men define the particular news story as the turning point in the eternal battle between the forces of freedom and the forces of evil, the truth will lie somewhere in the middle. What's depressing is that those who take the middle ground are morbidly few. Who would have thought the tech sector would create such starry-eyed romantics (as many online activists seem to be)?
not to be taken without a grain of salt... (Score:2)
Re:Gartner smells like Ziff Davis (Score:2)
I'm sure that the IDG numbers are total fluff -- they probably took total Linux downloads and ass-umed that X% were going to new server installs, and worked backwards from there. The fact that the 24% number is "shipped" is especially bogus because most servers don't ship with an OS at all.
Re:NT "Cost Efficiency" (Score:2)
There is one thing that MS can never beat Linux at, one thing that really appealed to the bean counter in my employers: Linux costs nothing and has no licensing fees - ever. Even if Linux and MS products run head-to-head in terms of their viability as servers in real-environment conditions, the cost savings tend to stack up over time. Why pay for a product when the alternative is just as good and free?
And don't go into 'service contracts'. I've never received any remotely useful information from MS for fixing a problem, yet can get extremely knowledgeable assistance for free from Linux fans on the net. And I can rewrite the code to work more efficiently in a specific environment, something you *just can't do* with MS products (this has got to be the most frustrating thing for me - not being able to see the code and change it as I see fit).
Take those things into consideration and Linux doesn't have to be better than MS where server software is concerned - just as good will do.
Max
I want one of those UPSes! (Score:2)
My server, which came with win95 in 1998, was not running anything when it shipped. I had to turn on the power. Then, after a few days, it ran Red Hat, and the last year it's been running debian.
Around here... (Score:5)