[ Thanks to Timothy R. Butler for this
link. ]
“As the economic downturn has taken its toll on GNU/Linux
companies, many surviving companies have decided to move away from
the desktop market, and focus on the server instead. This escalated
to an alarming pace after the death of Eazel, a startup that
created the Nautilus file manager, and while the focus-on-server
mania has calmed down lately, it is still very much alive. Yet, it
seems to me, that focusing on the server will in the end cause
these companies to loose not only the desktop, but the server as
well.“The first exhibit that I present to you to show that focusing
on the server will lead to loss of marketshare, is Mandrake’s rapid
ascent in Netcraft’s server survey. In recent months, it has been
found that Mandrake’s Apache/AdvancedExtranet server (a specially
tuned version of the Apache web server, along with servers for
other functions) has surpassed the usage of RedHat’s [sic]
Stronghold Apache server. In fact, AdvancedExtranet’s overall
growth was six times that of the web’s average.“The irony here, as some of you may note, is Mandrake is
primarily a GNU/Linux distribution focused on the
desktop/workstation market. That is not to say Mandrake Linux’s
server offering is not an excellent product, all accounts seem to
say it is. Yet, one has to wonder why RedHat–a company focused on
the server–is losing ground to a company that is traditionally
aimed at the desktop…”