All-time High for GNU/Linux: 44.6% Market Share
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2008-05-19 09:24:14 UTC
- Modified: 2008-05-19 09:26:43 UTC
...So says AWStats, based on Boycott Novell's logs for May 2008
Occasionally, some statistics of ours are shared in order for readers to realise that the
market share lie is caused by total neglect of niche sites -- namely Web sites that attract certain types of audience and will never ever share their logs to support some peripheral 'studies'. The title was chosen to be an eye-catcher, but it's true that it's an all-time high for us.
Like a few other sites that could be named as extremely conscious about visitors' privacy (they won't even include user-targeted scripts because of that), we never will expose any personal data. In fact, the logs get flushed every night, so there's no trace of them (only visual summaries remain). In any event, so far this month we've seen a very high volume of surfers whose operating system is identified (for certain) as "Linux". To give you the breakdown by distribution:
- Ubuntu: 7.4 %
- Suse: 4.3 %
- Fedora: 3.7 %
- Debian: 3.6 %
- Mandriva: 0.8 %
- Red Hat: 0.2 %
- Centos: 0.1 %
- GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution): 24%
We still opine that a Big Lie is being spread whenever some Web statistics are selectively gathered, commissioned, generated and then published to suggest low 'market share' (installed based) for GNU/Linux. The population considered in the studies is biased, even if not deliberately so.
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Comments
Ball_Mer
2008-05-19 10:15:05
Roy Schestowitz
2008-05-19 10:23:31
Very true. He's extremely harsh. Didn't he give ZenWalk a virtual slap and later praised Fedora for availability of source code? In any event, he scares a lot of developers because of his reviews. He even got Gael Duval nervous a couple of years back (Gael E-mailed to tell me).
ZiggyFish
2008-05-19 12:10:21