OneStat today reported that Microsoft's Windows dominates the operating system market with a global usage share of 96.97 percent. The Mac appears to be at around 2.47% and Linux at 0.36%. Please note that OneStat bases its numbers on a large number of internet site hits and extraction from user agents.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-08-07
The free and open source people have also created a new metric for software users. The thing is that before GNU started creating very useful utilities and giving them away very people knew anything about "source" code. Now we have international and national discussions about these things. Although many Linux hackers have turned their back on the historic software industry and are not concerned with any usefulness or practicality associated with non-free software, they have indirectly improved the closed source software by helping to keep the big proprietary software companies honest.
I didn't think that I would end up having to care about freedom to do whatever I wanted with software when I started my Computer Science degree. After years of frustration with Windows I realized that the situation was only going to get worse and that big companies like Microsoft, Autodesk, Adobe, etc were only going to intensify their hold on me. I realized that they were only going to spend an increasing amount of time coming up with new clever ways to prevent me from doing things that I want to do. I realized that these companies as a whole were more interested in locking me into a perpetual upgrade cycle then providing me with valuable services.
Lets face it. Today computers are POWER! There must be people in the community that know how they work and can change them and verify that they are working correctly. Without this we are all lost. Fortunately, we have it though, so its all good. Peace
Member since:
2005-07-08
The story of Linux and the free software movement in general is that nobody ever thought it would amount to anything, but we did it anyway. Even if we never reach 10% of the desktop market, we'll do it anyway.
We're not motivated by marketshare, we're motivated by progress. From my perspective, Linux and the free software stack is coming along quite nicely, and the pieces are really starting to fit into place better than I had expected. In the time it's taken Microsoft to develop Vista, a system that (very) generously represents a doubling of "utility" with respect to XP, the Linux distributions have undergone massive improvement that might very well be unprecedented in the history of software development.
Admittedly, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit. However, there's more low-hanging fruit today than there was 5 years ago, and there will be even more next year. Most OSS projects get more bug reports than they can handle, and the more people get involved in these projects, the more bugs we find. This isn't a sign of bad code, it's a sign of progress. As I said, we're motivated by progress.
We've taken a kernel that was designed for a single 386 and turned it into a kernel that scales efficiently from ARM-based cellphones to 4096-CPU NUMA servers. And you know what? It isn't really that tricky or complicated. With an intermediate background in C, you can skim through kernel/sched.c and see exactly how we implement constant-time scheduling and efficient load balancing. We do it because we can, not because we have customer demand.
Why do we insist on creating such a capable operating system, even though it isn't clear that we have a significant market? Because if we didn't do it, then nobody else would*. That would be a shame, because, as we've shown, it is possible. You just have to throw capitalism out the window and start hacking.
*Note: I don't want to take anything away from the many other community OSS kernels and operating systems out there, some of which have rivaled and surpassed Linux in many respects. These projects won't give up either, despite even more modest marketshare, and I have great respect for them.