Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2001 10:44:33 -0800 From: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> To: Anthony Atkielski <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> Cc: FreeBSD Advocacy <freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Prevalence of FreeBSD and UNIX among servers Message-ID: <3C0D1991.83D6EB6D@acuson.com> References: <00ef01c17cda$6b419760$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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Anthony Atkielski wrote: > > According to an article in BusinessWeek: > > http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_50/b3761094.htm > > Non-Linux versions of UNIX are expected to slip from 14% of the server market to 10% next year, and Linux is expected to grow from > 27% to 32%. Is this really true? This would imply that organizations are actively junking UNIX systems such as FreeBSD to go to > Linux, which I find extremely hard to believe (I can't think of any reason why anyone would want to junk any xxxBSD to install > Linux, which seems like a step backwards). Anyone know where these figures are coming from, or how realistic they are? The use of statistics is very useful if you want to obscure the truth. The server market is a dynamic and growing market. Market share is a static number. I seriously doubt for a minute that anyone is dumping FreeBSD for Linux. But it is entirely possible that people are deploying Linux instead of FreeBSD on *new* servers. And it is likely (according to rumour) that many old expensive Unix boxen are being replaced with new cheap Linux boxen. My current ISP started out with two expensive IRIX machines, and is now running on one expensive IRIX machine and three cheap FreeBSD boxen. I suspect that similar occurances are more frequent with Linux, simply because people know more about Linux than they do FreeBSD. > The article also says that Windows will grow from 41% of the server market to 47% by next year. This statistic doesn't answer the question of whether these Windows deployments are replacing existing Unix deployments, or whether the market itself has grown 7%. I believe it is a mixture of the two. I work for the world's sixth or seventh largest corporation. They are also an official Microsoft partner. For a variety of braindead rationales, we are replacing approximately 200 UltraSparc/Solaris boxen with Dell/Windows machines. These are desktop machines used by Unix developers. Our main servers are also getting replaced by Windows. I greatly suspect that we are not alone in the world. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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