But claiming that their metrics are a result of being in Microsoft’s pockets, implying yet-another-evil-deed, referring back to more opinions passed as flawed “analysis”, claiming you have a gut feeling that they’re wrong and cleverly pasting in off-context quotes by the alleged minions of Satan is not the way to go about making your point. Ignoring obvious logical holes in your claims isn’t, either.

This type of deeply flawed toxic advocacy (and I’m referring in general to most of what is put forth on this blog) does far more damage than Microsoft could ever hope to afflict the FOSS community with.

The thing is that NetApps gets a lot of attention from US/UK IT press, while other observations that show MUCH higher numbers and are equally representative are more or less ignored.

One example is OS stats on heise.de, which is THE mainstream IT new site in Germany. They have now 15% Linux users among their readers, and it would be way more if readers like me were in a situation to use Linux in the office where I read heise.de mostly.

Another example, if you question heise.de being representative is spigel.de which is one of the leading sites of the world (133 in Alexa) and a mainstream news website. Here Linux has around 4%-6%, coming from nearly nothing 2 yrs ago. While spiegel.de is a German news site, is is read from around the world like the BBC site.

It is IMHO safe to assume that Linux worldwide is closer to 2 % than to 1%. The only source who could reliably shed some light on this would be Google, but they refuse to publish any numbers.

But the best, and this nobody can ignore, is the trend. Linux usage is virtually exploding with growth in the double digit percentage area quarter per quarter.