GNU market penetration... (fwd)

[Jim Choate]

Forwarded message:

> Subject: Re: GNU market penetration...
> Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 14:43:51 -0600 (CST)
> From: ichudov at algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home)

> Jim Choate wrote:
> > I have a question, after going to the GNU homepage (www.gnu.org) I have not
> > been able to find out the numbers of how many if any corporate subscribers
> > and participants to the GNU Foundation. Is there anyone out there who might
> > have a pointer to this information, or better yet is an actual participant
> > in the GNU heirarchy and can discuss these and related issues?
> 
> The number of subscribers bears almost no relation to the number of users.

Here is what I am thinking...

 -  commercial success at larger commercial enterprises can be seen
    by looking at their gross orders of software. Consider that if a
    company decides they want to use Win95 and WinNT for their systems.
    Are they going to buy them one at a time? No, they are going to
    purchase either large quantities or site licenses.

 -  Since GPL doesn't really support site licenses in the normal sense
    they won't be there to look at. In other words the total number of
    site licenses from corporations for software is a measure of its
    penetration.

 -  Since GPL doesn't prohibit buying one copy and then making as many
    subsequent copies as you desire it is not likely that a given company
    is going to buy great quantities of GPL'ed software. What they'll do
    is have each department, through their own budget disbursement and
    orders, purchase such software as required. So we can expect to see
    one or more, but relatively few overall, purchases of software.
    Since this does not seem, to me anyway, to allow for a differentiation
    between one hacker purchasing the software in a comany or an entire
    department this also will not be a clear indication of penetration.

 -  Large companies faced with the above situations and having committed
    to the continued survival of those sources of software will want to
    create a situation where they minimize their need to keep re-ordering
    software as its needed (expensive in people and process time) the
    reasonable thing is to subscribe for annual terms or similar programs.

What I would like to know is what is the percentage of subscriptions by
companies in regards to the total number of subscriptions of GNU software.
I couldn't find any way to get this info on the www.gnu.org page. Since the
question is at what point is current penetration of Linux into commercial
entities as a standard business environment this seemed relevant.


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