Linux Users Vastly Underestimated
* Ashley Dunn’s recent article “Linux Gets Past the Front Door” (Sept. 16) has ignored some important issues:
* Linux is free, and there are no license restrictions.
* It can be downloaded directly off the Internet, and CDs cut and given out to friends.
* A single distribution can be purchased and used as many times as desired, no matter who owns the target machines.
* A single distribution can be duplicated, with no license restrictions.
All this means is that Linux sales figures represent a very small percentage of actual usage and cannot be compared with the sales figures of any operating system that can only be legally installed once from any purchased license.
I have often loaned my Red Hat distribution to friends and co-workers so they could load and run Linux. I know of one department at work that bought a single Red Hat distribution kit and used it to load up over 100 machines, about half of which are desktop workstations. Personally, I use Linux exclusively, both on my home PC and on a Dell laptop, even though the Dell was delivered to me with Windows installed.
The point is that there is no way to estimate the number of Linux installations in use throughout the world. In early 1998, the best estimate available was in the vicinity of 7 million Linux users. Since then, many individual Linux users and companies like Red Hat have been barraged with inquiries from Windows users who are switching to Linux.
Statements like “The program has become a challenger to Microsoft’s Windows NT, seizing about 16% of unit sales to the server market last year . . . “ do not portray an accurate picture of the real world, since a single unit sale can result in hundreds, or even thousands, of installations. Some users don’t even realize that they are using Linux.
And statements like “On the desktop and in the home, however, Linux has been virtually invisible--hovering at about 2% of sales last year for desktops . . . “ are like identifying a population by the number of oxygen canisters sold per year.
To find out what’s really happening, take a look at sites like https://lwn.net.
RAY MARSHALL
Chapel Hill, N.C.
