So the eminent Varun Dubey (whoever the hell he is) writing on the esteemed cooltechzone.com (whatever the hell that is) boldly states that “Linux is Doomed, Thanks to Microsoft”:http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2026 based purely on some recent Gartner report saying that Windows server licensing revenue outstrips Linux server licensing revenue by a few percent. According to Dubey, this predicts the end of linux, and he offers a number of half-baked hypotheses as to why.
This gets picked up by Memorandum, where I read it, and now I’m so incensed by the stupidity of the article and the life its taken on that I have to post about it. Memorandum also links to a “post by a self-described ‘Microsoft Pragmatic Evangelist'”:http://blog.opsan.com/archive/2005/11/27/2340.aspx, who quotes a piece of the article he finds “notable”
The most important reason that Windows based servers are doing so well could be that programmers find it extremely easy to work on .Net and other related technologies (seamless integration).
I agree that this is notable, it’s notable because it’s completely speculative, and it’s backed up by nothing at all. The evangelist, takes it, as evangelists are wont to do, as the truth, foretold.
Memorandum also links to an “excerpt of the article on OSNews”:http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12783. Which lamely tries to use the lame article itself to spin things in Linux’s favor. Digging into the comments, you see some uncritical thinking by people who accept that the Gartner report is indeed bad news for Linux.
Other commenters get closer to the heart of the matter, which is that the statistic that windows has 37% revenue share and linux 31.7% revenue share in the server market doesn’t tell you much about the future of Linux because the statistic, and the lame-ass CooltechZone article, conveys absolutely no trend information. Even without trend information though, that number could be pretty bad for Microsoft considering that one of the selling points of Linux is lower licensing costs. That small gap in favor of Microsoft for revenue share could be a huge gap in favor of linux in terms of new deployments.
I don’t follow the trends too closely, but I’m pretty sure these numbers represent an advance for Linux, but that’s not really the point of this post. The point of this post is to slag people who make too much about facts without sufficient context, and those who accept naked speculation as something more substantial.