Linux and pirated Windows vie for the new world

Stan Beer
Saturday, 02 October 2004 07:23

Open source proponents have hit back at a theory doing the rounds that the relatively high proportion of Linux PCs being sold in emerging markets end up being reinstalled with pirated versions of Microsoft Windows.

A forecast of the global PC operating system by ICT research group, Gartner, postulates that most Linux PCs shipped to emerging markets in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, end up installing an illegal pirated version of Windows.

According to Linux analyst Annette Jump, who authored the 4-page report issued in August Forecast:PC Market by Operating System, Worldwide, 1998-2008 (Exexutive Summary), by 2008, 7.5 percent of new PCs will ship with Linux, but over half of them will end up running a version of Windows. Jump in a later Gartner report predicts that around 10-12% of PCs shipped to emerging markets this year will initially have Linux installed because of the high cost of Windows. The 6-page report titled "Linux Has a Fight on Its Hands in Emerging PC Markets", issued on 21 September, claimed that the widespread availability of pirated versions of Windows stimulates the growth of Linux on PCs in emerging markets.

In other words, according to Jump, most users in emerging markets don't actually want Linux; they just don't want to pay the full price for Windows, which now constitutes a whopping 15% of the total cost of an average PC. Therefore, according to Jump of Gartner, they opt for the cheaper Linux PCs and later install a cheap pirated version of Windows. This claim has been attacked by Linux proponents, such as Australian open source industry body, Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA), which last week issued a statement disputing both Jump's conclusion and her figures.

"Without a fully specified methodology and a presentation of all the raw numbers and polling methods, these findings are extremely dubious. Additionally, Jump's logic is problematic at best and farcical at worst," read the OSIA statement.

"Firstly, let's get the key fact out of the way," said OSIA spokesperson Steven D'Aprano. "There is no advantage to PC resellers in using Linux as a means of shipping lower price PCs, which in turn are used to pirate Windows. These PC vendors can simply ship a PC without any operating
system at all! This would make the resulting computer even cheaper than deploying Linux on it, as zero effort is needed to image the system. If PC vendors are selling computers with Linux pre-installed, that can only mean there is demand for Linux on the desktop."

Supporting OSIA's view that Linux is starting to make serious inroads into Microsoft's market, is the fact that Microsoft itself is attempting counter Linux growth in emerging markets by releasing a cheap version of Windows XP called Windows XP Starter Edition. However, the cheap Windows version has copped considerable flack for not meeting users' needs and having no upgrade path to the full version of Windows XP. The cheap Windows only enables three applications to run simultaneously, limited to a maximum of three open windows each. There are also maximum memory (128M) and hard disk (40G) restrictions for PCs running the cheap operating system.

OSIA launched a further attack on the latest Gartner report for suggesting that the growth of preloaded Linux on PCs in emerging markets has encouraged the growth of Windows piracy in those markets.

"Gartner would have been better served by observing the historically low incidence of illegal copying of open source software products and the clear business benefits this provides to economies. As such open source software can contribute billions of dollars to local economies by
reducing software piracy. After two decades of closed source's failure to address rampant piracy, open source provides the only credible, and successful solution to the problem. If it was serious about the piracy problem Gartner would be out there supporting preloaded Linux," concluded D'Aprano.