“Establishing market share is always difficult in the Linux
world. For starters, there’s the issue of installations vs. sales:
a single copy of Slackware Linux, for instance, can be installed on
an unlimited number of servers and workstations. Secondly, there
are a large number of “stealth” copies of Linux sold through
bookstores and resellers like LinuxCentral; the bookshelves are
creaking with Linux books with a CD or multiple CDs containing a
full Linux distro. Some distributions, like Debian and Slackware,
simply aren’t sold in boxed sets in retail channels. And polls of
users done by internet.com show that corporate users by and large
buy Linux directly from distributors, totally eschewing the
reseller market.”
“That’s why I sometimes don’t take reseller data too seriously,
but there are some conclusions that one can draw from the
data.”