Robert Pogson

Okay. No one is quite sure what x hits per day for a distro means on DistroWatch.com but that won’t stop me from expressing an opinion…

I added up the current hits per day for the top 310 distros in the “more statistics”, 12 months section. The total? 34248 distro hits per day.

If a newbie reads about 5 distros before choosing one, that could mean that 7000 newbies switched to GNU/Linux each day for the last year. That’s 2.5 million converts in a year. These are mostly geeks, of course. Ordinary folk just take their software pre-installed. Assuming there are 20 ordinary folk adopting GNU/Linux per geek, that is 50 million converts. Of course geeks might lead a few to GNU/Linux or they might help them buy a PC pre-loaded with GNU/Linux.

The world is becoming a better place, one convert at a time.

Sadly, I noticed Debian has dropped a notch behind Mandriva,OpenSuse, Mint , Fedora, and Ubuntu. I guess some of us are too busy using the software to make converts. I will have to take up some slack. I will give lessons in installing Debian and .deb packages this semester and I have a stack of blank CDs I can burn. I could get 20 converts easily, not to mention the inevitable spread of GNU/Linux on the LAN here.

“Rivermuse co founder and open-source veteran Dave Rosenberg believes that while open-source companies can grow, it’s more realistic to see them make no more than $100m in annual revenue and feels that the magical $1bn mark is a stretch goal. The reason? The nature of open source – the fact that code is already out there and you must persuade customers to pay you to support something that their own techies are comfortable with and capable of doing.”

That’s from TFA, “Open source – the once and future dream” , on TheRegister.

Such attitudes miss the point of FLOSS entirely. People need computers to find, create, change, store and present information and anything people need they can create even the operating systems and applications of their IT systems. No longer, if it was ever true, do any corporations have a monopoly on that need and that ability. Businesses can make an arbitrary amount of money around FLOSS because there is an infinite amount of FLOSS to be generated not just the present tiny drop. No IT department, programmer, or geek can possibly do it all. It takes cooperation among huge numbers of people, many of them for-hire by businesses. Many large businesses will find that they need to create FLOSS to do their own work and they will distribute the result. Others will specialize at some level of other to help other businesses and individuals to use FLOSS. No one model is the solution. All models are part of the solution.

The opinion from TFA skips over IBM which makes billions annually from FLOSS. Sure IBM sells mainframes and servers but they also help many businesses create, manage, change IT systems that run on FLOSS. They have 15000 business customers… They create FLOSS. They distribute FLOSS. They configure FLOSS. They manage FLOSS. They do whatever the customer wants. The opinion also neglects that FLOSS businesses are growing at amazing rates. It does not matter that they are small. They will be larger as time goes by and there will be many more of them. Individual businesses will see it is in their interest to create, manage, configure, and to distribute FLOSS, so this is still only the beginning. FLOSS has a lot of room to grow.