Number crunching

Asking the wrong questions on open-source adoption

It used to make sense to talk about open source as a separate line item in the enterprise IT lexicon. However, open source has become such a standard way of delivering enterprise IT that maybe it's time to update the lexicon. It no longer makes sense to ask CIOs whether they plan to "deploy open source" as if it's somehow a separate and distinct question from, say, "Do you plan to deploy new database servers?" The questions are largely one and the same.

Apparently Baseline didn't get the memo though a few weeks … Read more

Oracle's Unbreakable Linux not denting Red Hat

Even as the global server market contracts by 14 percent, and Linux server sales decline 7 percent (Windows dropped 17.8 percent), according to IDC, Red Hat's Linux server business is swimming against the current.

A February 11 Piper Jaffray report ("Red Hat Inc.: Buy. Survey Shows Red Hat Will Be a Top Share Gainer") says its "survey of 89 domestic Oracle applications customers indicates that Red Hat is gaining IT budget share."

This isn't surprising. In late 2008, a Goldman Sachs report found that 44 percent of enterprises surveyed were planning to increase … Read more

Only 7 percent of active Firefox browsers running on Macs?

In the midst of counting the total number of Linux users in the world, Mozilla's Asa Dotzler reveals a startling statistic:

The Mac only accounts for roughly 7 percent of active Firefox browser installations.

Sure, Windows has massive market share, but I would have thought more Mac users would be running Firefox than their Windows peers. Meaning, I had assumed that whereas Windows users would be content to let inertia guide them to Internet Explorer (IE), a greater proportion of Mac owners would make the choice for Firefox, instead of Safari that comes preinstalled on the Mac, netting the … Read more

Ubuntu displaces CentOS at Groundwork: Good?

What's the takeaway when one free operating system displaces another when running your application?

That's the question I'd be asking myself at Groundwork in the wake of news from the Works with U blog that 29 percent of its new users are using Ubuntu to power its IT management application instead of CentOS, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone. When your users are falling all over themselves to avoid paying for an operating system, can the application be far behind?

Within my own company, we weight leads heavier if they are running our application with a paid … Read more

Good grades translate into rising Mac share

Buried in an insightful Ars Technica article on digital music is this casual throwaway line, "At Princeton, Macs accounted for an astonishing 40 percent of all student computers in 2008."

Forty percent?!? That's amazing. In the general operating-system market, according to Net Applications, Apple commands nearly 10 percent of the personal-computer market, which shows great progress over its formerly anemic market share but which still is a distant second place to Microsoft's 88 percent share.

But that's today. The funny thing about students is that they eventually graduate. With graduation comes jobs, which provide discretionary income to buy more Macs. … Read more

Firefox, Google's Chrome speed past IE, Opera

ZDNet Australia on Tuesday released updated browser speeds, as measured by the industry-standard SunSpider JavaScript test, and the results should give pause to proprietary-browser makers Microsoft and Opera Software:

Every open-source browser completely obliterated the proprietary browsers in terms of performance, and by a huge margin.

The test compared Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1, Opera 10.00 Alpha, Firefox 3.1b1, Chrome 2.0.158.0, and the WebKit r40220 developer project included in Chrome and Apple's Safari.

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox (along with WebKit) left the proprietary competition in the dust:

Maybe there's … Read more

Open-source CodePlex helps Microsoft grow up

What a difference a year makes. In the case of CodePlex, Microsoft's open-source code-hosting site, a year has seen Microsoft make serious progress toward real open-source savvy. The site has more than 120,000 registered users and 7,500 projects.

I've noted for years that open source should be an opportunity for Microsoft, not a threat. Windows, for example, should be the world's biggest open-source platform, but it's not, and Microsoft has only itself to blame for this.

But perhaps the rising popularity of CodePlex can help change this. The numbers, as called out by Microsoft's Peter Galli, … Read more

Open source zigs in a zagging VC market

Over the past year, the open-source business community has collectively donned a hair shirt over stumbles in venture funding, especially when venture funding in open-source companies took an apparent 12 percent slide in the third quarter of 2008.

However, while the second half of 2008 saw declines in open source-related venture funding, overall, funding levels were 35.5 percent higher than in 2007, according to The 451 Group.

This is pretty amazing, when you consider that overall U.S. venture capital investments plummeted 8 percent over 2007 funding levels, as TechCrunch reports.

And if you treat Washington state as a … Read more

Apache recovers while Microsoft IIS slides

Last year, it seemed that Microsoft was making great gains on the Apache Web server, with Apache dropping from its high of 70 percent of the Web server market to 50 percent.

Since then, however, Apache's market share seems to have stabilized while Microsoft's IIS has been losing share at a steady clip, according to Netcraft market share data and OStatic's analysis thereof.

There are a number of factors for Microsoft's losses, including "more than 2 million blogging sites running on Microsoft-IIS Web sites expir(ing) from the (Netcraft) survey," but the basic trend … Read more

Open-source developers' heads are in the cloud

Evans Data has published the results of a 360-person survey suggesting that 40 percent of developers working on open-source projects plan to deploy applications via the cloud, as OStatic reports.

The big winner here? Google. Twenty-nine percent of developers surveyed plan to use Google App Engine to deploy their applications, while 15 percent will look to Amazon.com.

Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce.com, and other cloud initiatives? They apparently don't make the grade, netting far less developer attention.

Other interesting data:

Types of open-source applications being developed: "enterprise business application" (30.7 percent), "developer tool" (20.… Read more