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Unpaid deploymentsUnpaid deploymentsPosted Nov 13, 2009 17:46 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1)In reply to: Notes from the LF End User Summit by jspaleta Parent article: Notes from the LF End User Summit He didn't say a whole lot more than what I reported; it was passed over fairly quickly. The IDC presentation had some pretty graphs showing that both types of deployments were growing at similar rates, though.
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Unpaid deployments Posted Nov 13, 2009 18:13 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Growing at similar rates... doesn't actually say anything about the nature of relationship between the two. Are the paid deployments driving unpaid or is it vice-versa.
Is the unpaid to paid deployment for linux distributions a close parallel to parasite and host relationships in biological ecosystems? And if so which is the host and which is the parasite? And what is the nature of the relationship? Is it primarily symbiotic where both groups benefit? Is it parasitic where one group is harmed at the benefit of the other? Or is it mutual convenience where for the most part neither is harmed or helped by the other (until an environmental stressor puts one community under pressure and throws off the dynamic balance)
I think we all want to believe the nature of the relationship its symbiotic. But I'm not sure we have metrics which point out that it is.
-jef
Unpaid deployments Posted Nov 13, 2009 19:51 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I would think that most places that do paid deployments also have unpaid
deployments for mitigating costs.
Many businesses require paid support for contractual reasons, or as part of
So there are all sorts of reasons why people do support, but they paid the
As far as development goes.. for busy projects you really do need full time
So I expect it's heavily symbiotic.
Maybe when the market for Linux stagnates you might see some adversarial
Unpaid deployments Posted Nov 13, 2009 20:56 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Even unpaid deployments create an ecosystem of skills, courses, books,
forums, blogs, etc - this is valuable to the paid-for product as long as there's still a 'conversion rate' from free to paid-for that is high enough (in absolute numbers) for the paid-for product provider to make a profit.
In some ways CentOS is a perpetual 'free trial' for people who are more cost
Unpaid deployments Posted Nov 13, 2009 21:13 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Yes... very plausible..rationale... arguments about how the market value could be increased by unpaid deployments. All of which is completely plausible... but no metrics which quantify or support the theory. Just because its plausible and rationale doesn't mean we should assume it to be true.. human behavior isn't particularly rationale. I'd like to see some trendable metrics which attempt to show that the market value of the ecosystem is being driven by unpaid deployments in the way you theorize. Metrics...hard numbers...with error bars...can't forget the error bars.
-jef
Unpaid deployments Posted Nov 14, 2009 0:27 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Nobody keeps track of numbers like that.It's nearly impossible to tell how many Linux vs Windows vs Unix servers are sold or being used. Here is the problem: Businesses don't advertise their IT infrastructure. They keep it secret because, frankly, it's nobody else's business. So the only way you can get a feel of a market wide is through server sales revenue. Why? (you may ask) Because most OEMs are large publicly held corporations. As being publicly held corporations they are required to publish a certain amount of information about revenue and markets to their customers. This information is publicly available since there is little point to keeping a secret, if that was possible. So the people that compile statistics can only extrapolate market shares by revenue shares. But there are many major problems to this approach, like: * It does not actually tell you what is being used for what. They may by a server, but you don't know for a fact that they are even using it for anything. As far as we know the majority of customers could be piling servers into a feild and setting them on fire. Now this is unlikely, but it would be impossible to really know one way or another. * It does not tell you how long they are being used. People tend to swap out Windows servers 2-3 years. People tend to use Linux and Unix systems for much longer. But you can't know to what extent or how often that is the case with any sort of reasonable accuracy, and it's impossible to know much more beyond educated guesses. * It does not reflect numbers of servers from sources other then purposely sold servers by major OEMs. So-called 'White Box' servers, which are popular, are sold by generally privately held corporations whose activities are not being tracked by research groups. Also you don't know about desktops-turned-servers, or people putting Windows on Linux servers or visa versa. And all sorts of things like that. Personally I think that this means that Linux market is heavily understated. But it's impossible for me to know one way or another. You may have noticed that Linux server revenue is closer to Unix revenue. However Linux servers tend to cost less then (guessing..) 5 grand while Unix systems can cost a half a million dollars sometimes, maybe even more. So the amount of Linux servers out there probably outnumber Unix systems 10 or even 100 to one. When you compare Linux vs Windows server the licensing for Windows is such that going out and buying a dedicated server from Dell is cheaper the taking a older machine and upgrading it or buying a desktop and installing Windows server on it... which is all common things for Linux folks to do. *shrug*
Unpaid deployments Posted Dec 1, 2009 10:52 UTC (Tue) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]
Why not just *ask* a sufficiently large sample of businesses? Under
restrictions to only publish aggregate numbers, if needs be. You probably won't get honest answers about their unpaid Windows deployments, but there is no big incentive to lie about unpaid Linux installations.
I was under the impression that many (most?) of the Gartner/IDC/whatever
Unpaid deployments Posted Dec 4, 2009 1:19 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the people filling out the surveys are not always going to be the people who know what's running.
over the last 10 years it hasn't been unusual to see a company pronounce that linux is junk and then learn that a lot of their datacenter infrastructure had been moved to linux without the senior management knowing about it.
the people who know how many systems are running linux are too busy getting work done to fill out this sort of thing
Unpaid deployments Posted Nov 16, 2009 16:31 UTC (Mon) by blitzkrieg3 (subscriber, #57873) [Link]
He said something along the lines of:
"If you asked me two years ago about the adoption of unpaid linux, I'd have said that it would mostly get converted to paid linux. That's not what happened."
The graph looked mostly linear for both. I could go into more detail but I believe he is going to post the slides somewhere.
Unpaid deployments Posted Nov 16, 2009 17:23 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Just to clarify... which "he" are you referring to? Brian Stevens or Carlos Montero-Luque or were you referring to Al Gillen's comments during his IDC presentation?
-jef"pronouns kills"spaleta
Unpaid deployments Posted Nov 16, 2009 17:25 UTC (Mon) by blitzkrieg3 (subscriber, #57873) [Link]
Al Gillen's comments during his IDC presentation
Unpaid deployments Posted Nov 16, 2009 17:42 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
That's an interesting quote about revising 2 year old market evolution expectations coming from the perspective of a 3rd party analyst. It would definitely be interesting to know how the IDC estimates the number of unpaid versus paid deployments for the purposes of producing the aforementioned graphs.
-jef
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