most commonly used Linux version?

[Andrew Scott Beals]

RH was first to the party with big support contracts.  They managed to get the mindshare of the ISVs and the 3rd party hardware folks.  Thus, if you're paying, you're running RHEL.  The cheapskates are running CentOS and they're suffering along … folks running Cent4 have been finding out that it doesn't support modern hardware all that well (e.g. built-in ethers on Intel H55 mobos), yet they're stuck with it as the APIs and better yet Perl packages changed enough (and some 3rd party freeware vendors withdrew support, going to a paid model) going to Cent5/RHEL5 that they're stuck on 4 until they put some brainpower behind it.  (JH wouldn't know of anyone like that, no siree)


For desktops, I've seen companies that run on Ubuntu.  I've also seen developers at companies that run RHEL/Cent on their servers prefer Ubuntu for their development desktops.  It's all a matter of taste, and who set stuff up.  Mindshare at the C-level will often dictate what goes on in the trenches, so we can't discount that.

Given my druthers, I put my essential services on *BSD boxen simply because they are so much more stable and less riddled with holes, from the filesystem to the services.

On May 24, 2011, at 9:51 AM, thomas at redhat.com wrote:

> Again, these stats are suspect simply because they are from a relatively niche sample. No argument Ubuntu does great in non-paid space, but that ain't a sustainable business model.
> 
> And in enterprise compute, I simply never hear of Ubuntu. So if I were to do a quick survey of that niche space it'd look awful for Canonical.
> 
> There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
> 
> "jldugger at gmail.com" <jldugger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Meanwhile, on Linode[1]...
> 
> 48% Ubuntu
> 24% Debian
> 16% CentOS
> 4.3% Fedora
> 3.1% Gentoo
> 
> Now granted, #1 in nonpaying customers is kind of a tough spot to be
> in. And the RHEL pricing model doesn't lend itself to The Cloud. I
> imagine Canonical has a paid agreement to cater their OS to EC2, but
> we can't read their 10-K's so we'll never know.
> 
> Justin
> 
> [1] http://www.linode.com/about/
> 
> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 11:35 PM, thomas at redhat.com <thomas at redhat.com> wrote:
>> The reason I said "depending on which report you read" is that "market share leadership" is such a nebulous term, it depends on how it's defined. Some reports I've seen say we have 85% of paid Linux revenue. Some reports say 55% of paid Linux server count. Still others say we're on 70% of all factory prepossessing of Linux.
>> 
>> Frankly, I find all of these suspect for a slew of reasons from statistical accuracy to methodology to just plain common sense.
>> 
>> Probably the closest thing to truth I can find - and even this is probably not the best yardstick - is revenue. Don't take my word for it, our 10K is public, as is Novell 's.
>> 
>> Also Gartner and IDC have some decent data on things like server sales and OS sales. Go look at those.
>> 
>> But the assertion that only managers and marketing types like RHEL, and real men like Debian is just absurd. What runs the NYSE? What does the FAA use to support the ~8000 planes in the air in US airspace every day? Hint: it ain't Debian.
>> 
>> TC
>> 
>> Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins at tarcanfel.org> wrote:
>> 
>> On Monday 23 May 2011 04:17:54 pm thomas at redhat.com wrote:
>> 
>>> We own between 65 and 85 percent of the Linux server market, depending
>>> on which report you read. Debian based distros are not really even a
>>> blip on the radar from a commercial standpoint.
>> 
>> Based on number of licenses sold, or total revenue?
>> 
>> IBM has a big share of the POS market, and their POS system is based on SuSE.
>> They don't count the licenses on a per-terminal basis as far as I know, so
>> their "market share" would be skewed too. ?I know of only one very small
>> specialty POS system based on RHEL.
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