EDITOR'S NOTE: DO THE RETAIL LINUX NUMBERS MEAN ANYTHING?
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. Take the results of
the most
recent retail market shares as researched by PC Data:
SuSE 48.3%
RedHat 28.9%
Macmillan/Mandrake 20.8%
Caldera 0.5%
Corel 1.2%
TurboLinux 0.2%
