“Linux service and support has become a big business, with large
hardware manufacturers taking increasingly active roles in helping
the open source community create software that is the best of its
kind. IBM and Intel are now building Linux into their long-term
ebusiness strategies; these giants are formulating ambitious
projects that will hopefully ensconce the rogue operating system in
the upper echelons of the corporate and research worlds….”
“The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that Linux
ships on at least 16 percent of servers worldwide today; those
figures quadrupled between 1997 and 1998, the last year for which
market share numbers are available. IDC will release 1999 market
data in the next few weeks. Getting an accurate count is difficult,
however, since many corporations and universities are unaware of
the Linux boxes lurking in their infrastructures.”
“What you get is a recent college graduate loading Linux on some
old system that’s kicking around, and it’s free,” said Dan
Kuznetsky, program director for IDC’s operating environments
service. “We have done a great number of studies and are
finding that a good deal of the time, the normal IT decision maker
is unaware of [Linux’s] presence.“