Linux's exact market share is very difficult to calculate because:

Using available data collected from other distributions, RedHat calculated a retail CD sell rate of :

IDC's most recent "Server Operating Environments" report provides the following breakdown of shipments in the Server OS space.

Using the 240K number shipped in 1997, IDC seems to be estimating ~750K total installed Linux server systems. Compared to other market share studies, IDC's may be underestimating the actual new Linux server installations - I believe IDC may be counting only top distributions in their survey.

Starting with Dataquest's market share figures published in June '98, I injected the incremental Linux numbers derived from RedHat's market survey (showing 7.5M users at the end of 1997).

IDC provides information on the relative market share of the Linux distributors:

I purchased and installed a copy of Caldera's OpenLinux v1.2 standard edition. I installed it on an old P5-100 / 32MB RAM machine in my office that used to run NT4. Knowing that device driver support on Linux was well below NT's, I intentionally chose a machine and peripherals that represented the 80% of the installed base (e.g. 3c509 NIC, Adaptec SCSI controller, etc.)

Caldera provided an auto-run CD which launched directly into their setup program - "LISA". Lisa prompted me for:

As mentioned earlier, one of the quirks of UNIX / Linux relative to NT is that video drivers run in userspace and are not required for most system functionality. Linux is quite content with just a command prompt.

A second round of installation scripts was necessary to install the GUI. The installer gave me the option of choosing which video subsystem to install / configure and I chose the Xfree86 server because it's an entirely open source system (the other option - MetroX - was provided by Caldera and is believed to be the more stable codebase).

This part of setup definitely required knowledge of video systems even beyond many power users. Not only did I have to know the name / make / model of my video card and chipsets but I was presented with questions about their revision numbers, the scan rates of my monitors, etc. After significant trial and error, I finally got my video system working correctly.

The latest generation Xfree86 + CDE was slick and definitely represented among the best-of-breed in UNIX GUI's. A SUN desktop user would be perfectly at home here. An advanced Win32 GUI user would have a short learning cycle to become productive.

Following UNIX philosophy, however, mastery of the GUI was not enough to use the full system. Simple procedures such as reading a file from a floppy disk required jumping into a terminal window, logging in as administrator, and running an arcane "mount" command.

A very illustrative case of how the Linux user community works was revealed by my experiences with the networking subsystem.

Caldera's OpenLinux installer only provided the client daemon to handle the BootP protocol (as opposed to DHCP) and for some reasons, it didn't install correctly. I looked around on the CD that Caldera provided for a DHCP daemon and couldn't find one.

A small number of web sites and FAQs later, I found an FTP site with a Linux DHCP client. The DHCP client was developed by an engineer employed by Fore Systems (as evidenced by his email address; I believe, however, that it was developed in his own free time). A second set of documentation/manuals was written for the DHCP client by a hacker in Hungary which provided relatively simple instructions on how to install/load the client.

I downloaded & uncompressed the client and typed two simple commands:

Make - compiles the client binaries

Make Install -installed the binaries as a Linux Daemon

Typing "DHCPCD" (for DHCP Client Daemon) on the command line triggered the DHCP discovery process and voila, I had IP networking running.

DHCP as an example of Linux process

Since I had just downloaded the DHCP client code, on am impulse I played around a bit. Although the client wasn't as extensible as the DHCP client we are shipping in NT5 (for example, it won't query for arbitrary options & store results), it was obvious how I could write the additional code to implement this functionality. The full client consisted of about 2600 lines of code.

One example of esoteric, extended functionality that was clearly patched in by a third party was a set of routines to that would pad the DHCP request with host-speciifc strings required by Cable Modem / ADSL sites.

A few other steps were required to configure the DHCP client to auto-start and auto-configure my Ethernet interface on boot but these were documented in the client code and in the DHCP documentation from the Hungarian developer.

Key takeaways here:

Caldera bundled StarOffice from Star Corp in Germany. The Office team is quite familiar with StarOffice as a "second-string" contender in the suite category after Corel (which is bundled with Red Hat) and Lotus.

StarOffice was almost entirely an Office 97 clone from a UI perspective. The menus, buttons, placement, etc. were all generally identical. In many cases, large areas of functionality in the menu bar were missing (e.g. Macros). Other stereotypical Office97 features (e.g. red squiggles under misspelled words) were correctly replicated.

As a test, I tried importing a somewhat simple PowerPoint document into StarOffice from a floppy disk. This required jumping into an x-terminal and mounting a new floppy disk into the Linux file system namespace and pointing out to Linux that it was FAT16 formatted. From there, I launched StarOffice's PowerPoint clone and pointed it at the namespace for the floppy and uploaded the file.

Simple slides (such as pure text + bullet points) imported nearly 100% correctly (although fonts and sizing were changed). Complex sides (using PowerPoint's line art, etc.) were almost always totally trashed.

And now every major database except Microsoft's is either already shipping or about to be. Database servers running on Beowulf should also be quite a shocker to Microsoft when it happens (maybe to big UNIX iron too). }

Caldera also bundles Netscape's Navigator browser. The browsers UI, of course, perfectly matches Netscape's UI on win32 platforms.

I didn't have the time to run true performance tests, but my anecdotal / percieved performance was impressive. I previously had IE4/NT4 on the same box and by comparison the combination of Linux / Navigator ran at least 30-40% faster when rendering simple HTML + graphics.

Testing end user applications on top of Linux will be an interesting performance test in the future.

On a negative note, after I had instantiated 3 instances of Navigator on the box, performance came to an almost complete standstill, the mouse become unresponsive, none of the keyboard command sequences worked and I had to reboot the box.

Skilled users with modest developer backgrounds are probably delighted to use Linux due to the endless customizability afforded by Open Source. The simplicity and consistency of the process to modify the system presents a very low learning curve towards "joining" the Linux process.

Long term, my simple experiments do indicate that Linux has a chance at the desktop market but only after massive investments in ease of use and configuration. The average desktop user is unfamiliar with "make".

A December 1997 survey of Fortune 1000 IT shops by Datapro asked IT managers to rate their server OS's on the basis of: TCO, Interoperability, Price, Manageability, Flexibility, Availability, Java Support, Functionality, and Performance. RedHat provides summary info at: http://www.redhat.com/redhat/datapro.html.

When overall satisfaction with the OS's was calculated, Linux came out in first place. Linux was rated #1 in 7 of 9 categories in the DataPro study losing only on: functionality breadth, and performance (where it placed #2 after DEC)

Windows NT is target #1 for the Linux community. To characterize their animosity towards NT (or, for that matter, anything Microsoft) as religious would be an understatement. Linux's (real and perceived) virtues over Windows NT include:

Linux developers are generally wary of Sun's Java. Most of the skepticism towards Java stems directly from Sun's tight control over the language - and lack of OSS.

The Linux community has been asking Sun to treat the Linux platform as a tier-1 Java platform almost since the dawn of the language. However, Sun does NOT support the JDK for Linux.

The Linux community has ambivalent feelings towards Sun. On the one hand, as the most vocal critic of Microsoft, Sun is praised. On the other hand, as the most visible yardstick in the UNIX world, beating Solaris / SunOs is a favorite past-time of Linux hackers.

Using the Lmbench OS benchmark, Linux outperforms SunOS not only on x86 but, impressively, on Sun Hardware as well in networking, process / context switch times, disk I/O, etc.

Some (not very scientific or comprehensive) OS performance statistics can be found on: http://www.caip.rutgers.edu/~davem/scoreboard.html.

In generating these performance results, the great number of eyes (and consequently large amount of hand tuning / optimizing of critical code paths) is most frequently cited.

Sun has recently announced (8/10) the free licensing of Solaris binaries for non-commercial institutions (http://www.sun.com/edu/solaris/index.html). Presumably this is due to competitive pressures from Linux.

The vast majority of Linux's installed, production base is projected to be in servers.

Reasons why Linux is strong in this market include:

Linux is often used to provide commodity, low horsepower, high reliability network infrastructure services. For example:

One of Linux's core user bases is ISP shops. Some of the reasons for this include:

Linux is emerging as a key operating system in the nascent thin server market:

IDC published a study of 3 corporate IS departments which had significantly deployed Linux. Cisco has several hundred Linux servers deployed through their organization serving the following functions:

Due to it's UNIX heritage and Hacker OS background, Linux is a weak client-desktop OS. Additionally, the OSS paper points out why, in a broad sense, OSS is much more of a server threat than a desktop threat.

There are, however, several initiatives attempting to push Linux as a viable desktop replacement. Each of the various Desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, CDE) come bundled with basic productivity applications and there are 2 full fledged office suite products (from Corel and StarOffice) which provide varying degrees of file format compatibility with Microsoft Office.

Unlike the Kernel - where Linus Torvalds maintains the core source tree, the Linux GUI has NOT been singularly managed and consequently has a highly forked tree.

Linux does not have a consistent UI look and feel due to the variety of widget sets (a widget is analogous to an OCX or VBX) such as Motif, LessTiff, MIT Athena, Sun OpenLook, etc. Because widgets represent central UI concepts (such as a close button, dropdown menu, dialog box, etc.), users get different look-and-feels and often different usage semantics.

In addition to Widgets, the "desktop" or "shell" has also forked. Primary players in the shell arena include:

Linux as a client has found a home with UNIX developers. Many developers prefer to use Linux for their dev machines in order to write code for other UNIX platforms. The ease of debugging on top of a platform where there is open source is often cited.

Corel's NC devices were based on a Linux derived OS. These efforts, however, have since been suspended (with the Corel developed application-level code being returned to the OSS community)

There are literally hundreds of small research projects attempting to improve various parts of the Linux OS.

Some projects include:

The biggest future issue for Linux is what to do once they've reached parity with UNIX. JimAll used the phrase "chasing taillights" to captures the core issue: in the fog of the market place, you can move faster by being "number 2 gaining on number 1" than by being number 1.

Linux has now reached parity / incrementally ahead of other Unixes. Consequently, it will be much harder to achieve the big leaps the development team is accustomed to.

From Wired's piece on Linux:

A second paper on "Open Source Software" goes into depth on the generic advantages of the Open Source Process.

Unix Heritage & Fast Copying

Linux unabashedly steals the best ideas from the various UNIX flavors. This means free R&D. Recently, Linux has begun to copy NT-ish features such as transmitfile(), a hacked form of IO Completion Ports, etc.

Established / high-visibility bazaar

Linux is the most often cited example of a "credible" open source project. By being the largest OSS project today, it's the most sustainable in the future.

Dominance In Education / Research Markets

New ideas from academia + new computer scientists are being trained wholesale in the Linux OS. In particular, Europe and Asia are very hooked on the Linux OS. Email from BartelB (Marketing Manager EdCU):

The paper on "Open Source Software" provides general process weaknesses. Here, we'll try to list only the weaknesses that are unique to Linux.

Unix Heritage

Too Many Managers

In a typical Linux distribution, the majority of the code comes from sources outside of the main Linux tree. This piecemeal approach will make it especially hard to solve architectural problems and launch new, cross-component initiatives.

This section is pure speculation. What are some of the worst case scenarios for Linux to hurt Microsoft?

Customer Adoption - It gets good enough

Using today's server requirements, Linux is a credible alternative to commercial developed servers in many, high volume applications. The effect of this on our server revenue model would be immense.

Our client-side revenue model is still strong however for a variety of reasons including switching costs for the entire pool of win32 source code. Linux advocates, however, are working on various emulators and function call impersonators to attack this cost.

This points back to an obvious solution - innovation in the core platform is an ongoing requirement.

Channel Adoption

The "Open Source Software" paper has a section on OSS business models. Summarizing that section, there are 4 primary business models we have identified for Open Source Software.

IBM Adopts Linux?

IBM is most capable at capturing revenues from all 4 of the business models associated with Linux.

IBM, despite their Apache announcements, seems unlikely to advocate this in the short run. I'd imagine that religion within their various OS development efforts alone would provide a significant amount of near term inertia.

Sun Adopts?

Sun's rationale for adopting Linux would be less encompassing than IBM's.

PC OEM's

Other worst case adoption scenarios are subsets of the Sun / IBM case and involve other PC vendors such as Compaq and Dell.

Note, however, that Compaq and Dell merely have to credibly threaten Linux adoption in order to push for lower OEM OS pricing.

Server ISVs

One interesting spin on the "Commoditizing Downstream Suppliers" strategy could be backward integration by server ISV's. For example, Oracle could ship a version of Parallel Server for Linux that includes the Linux OS within the distribution.

This is basically a play on the thin-server concept. Instead of integrating multiple small business functions on a single server, this attempts to disintegrate the features of an enterprise OS into the minimal set necessary to run the specific server application. It plays into the business models identified as follows:

A lot more thought and work needs to go into formulating Microsoft's response to Linux. Some initial thoughts on how to compete with Linux in particular are contained below. One "blue sky" avenue that should be investigated is if there is any way to turn Linux into an opportunity for Microsoft.

A more generalized assessment of how to beat the Open Source Software process which begat Linux is contained in the "Open Source Software" document.

The single biggest contributor to Linux's success is the general viability of the UNIX market. Systematically attacking UNIX in general helps attack Linux in particular. Some Linux-targeted initiatives in this space (not a comprehensive list) include:

Modularize / Embed Windows NT

Relative to other UNIX's Linux is considered more customizable. Addressing this functionality involves more than just the embedded Windows NT project. Greater componentatization & general dependency reduction within NT will improve not only it's stability but also the ability of highly skilled users/admins to deploy task-specific NT installations.

This requires:

Linux's homebase is currently commodity network and server infrastructure. By folding extended functionality into today's commodity services and create new protocols, we raise the bar & change the rules of the game.

Some of the specifics mentioned in the OSS paper:

Leverage ISV's for system improvements

A key long term advantage that Linux will enjoy is the massive pool of developers willing to improve areas of the core platform. Microsoft will never be able to employ a similar headcount.

A key mechanism to combat this is to make it easy (and provide incentives) for ISV's to extend system components in NT for custom, vertical applications. One example here could be Veritas' specialized file system drivers for NT.

"WinTone"

Linux's modularity and customization also implies inconsistencies in services available on an arbitrary Linux installation. Microsoft can provide a bundle of services that are universally available in all OS releases (current initiatives include WBEM-based management) that generate network externalities when combined across many devices in the network.

Put another way, the extreme modularity of Linux devalues what a "Linux-logo'ed" app means. By contrast, Window's monolithic nature gives an app developer more leeway in terms of what API's are callable.

Where is Microsoft vulnerable to Linux? As stated earlier, the primary threat resides on the server vs. the client.

Linux will "Cream Skim" the Best NT Server Features

The Linux community is very willing to copy features from other OS's if it will serve their needs. Consequently, there is the very real long term threat that as MS expends the development dollars to create a bevy of new features in NT, Linux will simply cherry pick the best features an incorporate them into their codebase.

The effect of patents and copyright in combatting Linux remains to be investigated.

Linux is recreating the MS "3^rd release is a charm" advantage - FASTER

Microsoft's market power doesn't stem from products as much as it does from our iterative process. The first release of a Microsoft product often fairs poorly in the market and primarily of generates fine granularity feedback from consumers. Similarly, Linux has shown that they are capable of iterative cycles - but at an order of magnitude faster rate. On the flip side, however, our incremental releases are arguably much larger whereas many of Linux's incremental releases are tantamount to pure bug fixing.