I'm always beating my head against a while with companies like Garmin, and other companies who make windows only software for their hardware. They always use the line "there is no market share". Although 1.3 Million unique IP's should count for something.

I feel the problem is with companies like Dell. They don't offer anything other than windows for their desktop computers. If they offered Fedora pre-installed on their systems it would give Linux some exposure. They offer RHEL4 on their servers. Why not fedora on their desktop models?

Ok I know long winded. So my question. How would can we get Dell (and others) to offer Fedora as an option on their computer. (even if it's a "for advanced users only" option.)

If it was an option it would give Fedora/Linux instant exposure that companies like Garmin could no longer use the "no market share" line.

Maybe if all 1.3 million people send Dell and e-mail it would do something?!


oh my ultimate goal here is choice. If propitiatory companies start creating linux software we have the choice of free software or software with paid accountability.

Market share is relative. If you have 1 Billion M$ users then worrying about 1 Million Linux users is not going to be high priority. Businesses operate on margins so will gleefully shutdown an operation that while making them $1 Million a year in real cash is actually dragging down the bottom line margin due to high costs. That is to say if you have to spend $900 Million in costs to produce $901 Million in revenue you have margin (less than 1%) that is horrible from business perspectives even though you made $1 Million in cash. Private companies may be able to shrug that off and focus on the pure cash but Public companies are crucified by Wall Street for that kind of stuff. The idea being they could have spent the $900 Million on something that had higher margins.

I work for a company that has a primary business and a secondary business. Despite the fact that it's secondary business provides 25% of its revenue its mission statement purposefully leaves out that secondary business. While the secondary business isn't doing the horrible margins mentioned above the company knows that it would be if they started throwing tons of money at it.

More telling for Garmin than whether there are 1 million users already should be the fact that major corporations such as IBM and Oracle are embracing Linux as a platform for IT. Additionally would be the number of corporations that are using Linux in business. Garmin is more likely to be prodded by the fact that future market share might leave them out because someone else made a Linux product and they didn't so they'll have to play catch up.

I always remember how IBM had a dominant PC market share due to their PC line and ignored their own history by trying to make MCA only systems thinking people would throw away ISA cards just because they wanted to use IBM PCs. In the meantime Compaq and others came up with EISA that allowed one to continue to use ISA or EISA giving people a way to go forward without throwing away existing investments. When PCI came along it was successful because of broad industry adoption rather than a single vendor trying to go it alone.

Of course I'd be surprised to find there were only 1.3 million unique Linux IPs. It would be a matter of definition of "unique" I suppose. If my company has over 30 Linux servers in our Network do you consider those "unique" even though they aren't seen out in the WWW? Are you talking about home users and if so do you only count the IP from the ISP to the home router? Most Linux geeks I know have multiple systems hanging off their home routers.

Wow... thanks for the business lesson...


I'm getting the 1.3 million users from this.

http://fedoranews.org/mediawiki/inde...edora_Users.21

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics

This is 1,387,891 unique IP's using yum to update their server. So if those 30 machines have never run a "yum -y update" there not in the count.


Or at least that's what I assume.

Right. Of course that's only the Fedora people that use them as a yum source. Some people will use them as a source for one server then make that internal server a source for all their other internal servers.

Dell has no financial incentive to do Fedora over RHEL (or Suse) since it's free. They can resell the others. (The first RHEL we got here we bought from Dell.) Of course IMO Dell Linux support bites wind which is why we haven't bought any more RHEL from them.