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 From : Sergey Lentsov                       2:4615/71.10   22 Mar 2001  18:11:07
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 Subject : URL: http://lwn.net/2001/0322
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    Here is the [43]permanent site for this page.
    
    See also: [44]last week's LWN.
    
 Leading items and editorials
 
    Who really is the leading distributor? This week SuSE put out [45]a
    press release on the latest PC Data report. SuSE certainly has reason
    to brag: according to this report, SuSE now has 48% of the U.S. retail
    Linux market. That's a full 20% above the nearest competitor. Not bad
    for a company which recently shut down most of its U.S. presence.
    
    Of course, many of us here in the U.S. find that figure a little hard
    to credit. The high quality of SuSE's product is well known, and the
    distribution does seem to be gaining mindshare here. But SuSE does
    not, in any long-term sense, own half the U.S. market. What's going on
    here, of course, is that these figures are for the month of February,
    when SuSE released version 7.1 of its distribution. New releases will
    always cause a spike in sales, and the fact that this release was the
    first by a major distributor to include the 2.4 kernel must have
    helped.
    
    Time for some perspective. Here's results from some market share
    surveys that have come out over the last year or so:
    
     Distribution  [46]March 2000 [47]April 2000 [48]December, 2000
    [49]February, 2001
    Caldera                    3%           4.6%         -           0.5%
    Corel                   19.3%           8.7%         -           1.2%
    Linux-Mandrake          19.6%          31.1%                28% 20.8%
    Red Hat                 40.4%          35.5%         -          28.9%
    SuSE                     7.1%           8.6%         -          48.3%
    Turbolinux               4.1%           8.7%         -           0.2%
    
    Back in December, MandrakeSoft claimed the top spot as
    Linux-Mandrake 7.2 made the rounds. Not too much before that, Red Hat
    fancied itself the top distributor. Who, exactly, is it really?
    
    The answer, of course, is that nobody really knows. The various
    surveys track retail sales, which is a useful number. But there is
    little correlation between the number of boxes sold and the number of
    installed systems. And the number of boxes sold appears to be highly
    volatile, depending on each distributor's release cycle.
    
    Since Linux is free software, there is no way to really know how many
    installed systems there are. There are no licenses to buy, after all.
    And Linux users are, to a great extent, unlikely to cooperate with any
    scheme that tries to track installed systems. It's nice that you can
    use Linux without having to tell anybody who you are.
    
    The above table leads to some conclusions, though. The news for
    Caldera, Corel, and Turbolinux, at least in the U.S., looks a little
    grim. Corel, especially, is in trouble, since retail sales were
    exactly what the company was hoping to make money on. But we knew that
    already. Caldera and Turbolinux have revenue models that go beyond box
    set sales, at least.
    
    The big three for retail sales in the U.S. seem to be Linux-Mandrake,
    Red Hat, and SuSE - though SuSE's long-term staying power remains to
    be seen. Of those three, any can probably top the charts on any given
    month when they release a new version.
    
    These charts, thus, don't really tell us who the top distributor is.
    Instead, they should be seen as similar to the movie box office
    listings. We can see who is doing the best at the moment, but the
    actual information content is limited. It just tells us who produced
    the current hit.
    
    There is good news here, though. One thing that can be concluded is
    that the U.S. distribution market is still not dominated by any one
    company. That is important: diversity and choice are part of what
    makes Linux great.
    
    What software is running inside your TV? [50]In June, 2000, LWN
    disagreed (lightly) with Richard Stallman regarding this quote:
    
      I'm less concerned with what happens with embedded systems than I
      am with real computers. The real reason for this is the moral
      issues about software freedom are much more significant for
      computers that users see as a computer. And so I'm not really
      concerned with what's running inside my microwave oven.
      
    Our claim was that embedded systems will increasingly impact our
    lives, and that the freedom to decide what runs on those systems is
    important.
    
    So it was interesting to encounter [51]this note from RMS on the
    [52]Politech list. Therein, he expresses concern about interactive
    television, as described on the [53]Spy TV web site. Fancy interactive
    TV systems can do all kinds of profiling, and can engage in many types
    of manipulative behavior, even if they report no information back to a
    central system. Says RMS:
    
      A lesson can be drawn from this which I think the site itself does
      not draw: that any non-free program that you allow into your life,
      if it is in a position to receive complex instructions from the
      Internet, is a potential agent to manipulate or interfere with you,
      and cannot be trusted.
      
    Now, an interactive television does differ somewhat from a microwave
    oven in terms of its ability to "manipulate or interfere," but it is
    true that neither is seen, by most people, as a computer.
    
    This is an issue that will present itself increasingly often in the
    coming years as computers disappear into the devices we use all day
    long. An awareness of the issue, and of the importance of software
    freedom, will be always more important. The capabilities and
    assumptions built into our devices are going to have a growing
    influence over our freedom in general.
    
    Embedded Linux has the potential to help, since the base software is
    available. But embedded Linux does not require that the applications
    that run on it be open, or, for that matter, that there be any way to
    examine or modify the software running in a particular device.
    Hardware running embedded Linux can be just as closed as any other
    system. Even if Linux succeeds in domination of the embedded world,
    we're going to have some interesting fights on our hands.
    
    CLIQ closes in.  The Colorado Linux Info Quest is set to take place in
    just over a week in the plains along the eastern slope of the Rocky
    Mountains. [54]CLIQ 2001 will be held in the Denver Marriott Tech
    Center hotel on March 30th and includes speakers such as David L.
    Sifry of Linuxcare, Scott Draeker of Loki Entertainment, Rick Lehrbaum
    of LinuxDevices.com, Havoc Pennington of Red Hat and the GNOME
    Foundation, Kurt Granroth of SuSE and KDE, Bdale Garbee of Debian,
    David A. Desrosiers of Linuxcare, Paul Everitt of Digital Creations,
    author Jon Lasser, Darryl Strauss of VA Linux and the XFree86 project,
    and Patrick Lannigan of NuSphere. LWN.net is proud to be a 2nd year
    sponsor of this show. Other Sponsors and exhibitors this year include
    tummy.com, SGI, Compaq, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Xi Graphics, and Monta
    Vista Software.
    
    Note that [55]online registration closes on Friday, March 23nd, so be
    sure to register early and join us at the premiere Linux event of the
    Rocky Mountain region.
    
    Inside this week's Linux Weekly News:
      * [56]Security: Honeynet Forensic Challenge results; a bug in PGP?;
        FTP server denial of service problem.
      * [57]Kernel: The memory map semaphore; finding bugs with global
        static analysis.
      * [58]Distributions: Linux Distribution quiz; Progeny Debian;
        K12Linux - LTSP.
      * [59]On the Desktop: PocketLinux takes on all handhelds, Applix
        sells out, and Nautilus comes but does Eazel go?
      * [60]Development: ALSA sound, Paranoid Backup, LSB-OS test suite,
        KDE-women, Objective Caml.
      * [61]Commerce: Clusters and cluster management sytems; more new
        products including Nautilus and Playstation 2 Tools for Linux by
        Metrowerks.
      * [62]History: Four years ago, the first Atlanta Linux Showcase was
        announced; Two years ago, CeBIT '99 was the leading event of the
        week.
      * [63]Letters: What is Linux?, XFree86, Uncle Harlan, Politics.
        
    ...plus the usual array of reports, updates, and announcements.
    
    This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
      * [64]Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor
      * [65]Elizabeth O. Coolbaugh, Managing Editor
      * [66]Michael J. Hammel, Senior Editor
        
    March 22, 2001
    
                               [67]Click Here 
    
                               [68]Click Here 
    
    
                                                        [69]Next: Security
    
    [70]Eklektix, Inc. Linux powered! Copyright Л 2001 [71]Eklektix, Inc.,
    all rights reserved
    Linux (R) is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
 
 References
 
    1. http://lwn.net/
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    3. http://lwn.net/2001/0322/security.php3
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   48. http://www.businesswire.com/webbox/bw.020801/210392018.htm
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   54. http://thecliq.org/
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   64. mailto:lwn@lwn.net
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   66. mailto:lwn@lwn.net
   67. http://ads.tucows.com/click.ng/buttonpos=lwnbutton125top
   68. http://ads.tucows.com/click.ng/buttonpos=125-001-016
   69. http://lwn.net/2001/0322/security.php3
   70. http://www.eklektix.com/
   71. http://www.eklektix.com/
 
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