Linux market share growing, growing, growing

David M Williams
Monday, 01 June 2009 11:05

Opinion and Analysis

Q: What is the true market share for Linux? A: Depends who you ask! You can find desktop penetration of 1%, 2% and 4% - and a server share right up to 46%!

This time last month a Computerworld blogger reported Linux market share had surpassed 1%.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who surpasses my affectation of using a middle initial by also having a double-barrelled surname, ran the catchy headline “1% Linux, 99% to go.”

Vaughan-Nichols referred to Net Applications, a Web site analytics company, who had just published their April 2009 Web users survey called Market Share. They found that “Linux usage share on client devices has surpassed 1% for the first time in our tracking.”

Actually, while the figure for April did hit 1.02% the May result shows a dip down to 0.99%. The same survey includes iPhone (0.60%) and iPod Touch (0.15%) use and even Nintendo Wii (0.01%) so it is sure tracking a variety of devices that use the web.

I looked into where Net Applications gets data. They say “We use a unique methodology for collecting this data. We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month.”

That’s certainly a lot of data, although it would be nice to know who the “exclusive on-demand network” participants are. For instance, if Microsoft’s TechNet web site is included (which may or may not be the case, but a Microsoft logo is part of a rotating list of logos displayed) then you would expect it is likely visitors to that site tend towards using Microsoft operating systems.

Some may scoff at a market share of 1% but it must be noted that the March 2009 result in the same survey shows 0.90% share for Linux. There was a remarkable increase of 0.12% within April – perhaps attributable to the newest release of Ubuntu Linux – which compares impressively with an average monthly growth of 0.02% over the previous months.

Net Applications shows that Microsoft has steadily lost share of over 3% in the last 12 months. The major winner of this has been Apple’s Macintosh but at least Linux is receiving some of the defection albeit at a slower rate.

Nevertheless, Net Applications is just one source of data. If you look elsewhere, using a different representative set of web sites, the Linux market share is growing ... not 1%, but 2% and even 4%.