Re: [tlug] Enterprise Linux Support

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 08:03:58PM +0000, Botond Botyanszki wrote:

>This week I saw an article somewhere pointing to a huge (25% or so)


Yeah, I saw that too.  That's a very significant number, because Debian
does not (I believe, although I have only anectdotal evidence and my
own opinion to support this belief) draw many people fresh from the ranks
of want-to-be-former Windowsusers.  I think that the great majority of
Debian users probably come from another distro and that most who do
not are probably coming from some other flavor of *nix.  This means that
nearly all of Debian's growth comes at the expense of other distros or
Unixen, whereas for most other distros, that growth comes in significant
part from people migrating away from Windows (and some away from proprietary
Unixen, of course).  

That, in turn, means that Debian is tremendously advancing its mindshare
among Linux users.  The way I think the Linux market will shake out is
that Debian will be dominant among binary-based distros, Gentoo will
be dominant among source-based distros, and Red Hat will wind up with
a (granted, relatively large and fairly profitable) niche among larger
companies who want paid, guaranteed support, certification from Oracle
that Oracle will run on it, and "someone to sue if things go wrong."
Among those three, I expect Debian will probably wind up with the
single largest user base (of course, now I've probably hexed them by
saying that :-p ).

Jonathan
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