“Research conducted by Idaya (www.idaya.co.uk), sponsors of the
freeVSD project (www.freevsd.org), has revealed that the Linux
market is expected to grow by over 150% during 2001. Linux is
predicted to become the most dominant global web server platform by
mid 2002, and there is majority confidence that open source
software will become the most dominant underlying technology for
web hosting services by 2003.”
“However, this growth is dependent on improvements in Linux
functionality, principally the wider porting of standard
productivity applications to Linux, and failsafe techniques such as
file system journalling. The main potential obstacles to Linux
market growth are seen as: lack of support availability from the
distributions and application developers; and market conservatism
and distrust of GPL-based solutions.”
“The Idaya/FreeVSD research was conducted between January and
March 2001 amongst the global top 1000 Internet Service Providers –
precisely the companies that have made the greatest investment in
GPL technology and applications. Respondents were a mixture of
business managers, technical heads and service managers.”