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Open source rising
 Things
are looking good for the proponents of Open Source software on all fronts—even
the desktop though I’ll come to that in a bit.
The components of the famous LAMP stack—Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP—are
doing fine. Linux servers, as per IDC Q307 data, posted a fifth consecutive
quarter of double-digit growth, with year-over-year revenue growth of 10.7%
for a total of $1.8 billion in the quarter. Linux servers now represent 13.4%
of all server revenue. That’s dwarfed by the $4.1 billion that Unix server
sales accounted for and the $5.3 billion from Windows servers although the sales
growth of Linux boxes outpaced those of its rivals—Unix by a long distance
and Windows by a 1% margin.
Apache, the world’s numero uno Web server, is going strong. As per Netcraft’s
December 2007 survey, Apache has close to 50% of the market with Microsoft’s
IIS coming second with almost 36%. The contender to watch here is Google which
is increasing its market share (now 5.5%) unlike all the other players which
are seeing slow declines.
Talking of Netcraft, it has a rather interesting search that lets you find out
what OS any site is running and it lists download.microsoft.com and search.microsoft.com
as running Linux. Strange, if true.
Coming to MySQL, it’s been in the news with Sun Microsystems paying a billion
dollars to purchase the arguably third-most popular database by deployments
after Microsoft’s SQL Server and Oracle’s flagship product.
PHP is immensely popular with 33% of Web sites using it in November 2007 as
per Nexen.net.
Coming to Open Source on the desktop, while desktop Linux remains kludgy, OpenOffice.org
is doing just fine. Various estimates put it at anything between 10 and 20%
of the market. I think that usage is higher. In India, at least, many large
organizations have put the bulk of their users on OpenOffice restricting Microsoft
Office to a handful of people who interact with the outside world.
The FireFox browser is popular and with the release of version 3 on the anvil,
I expect usage to grow. FireFox 2 is prone to memory leaks but 3 even in beta
2 is proving to be an excellent browser.
The only area in which Open Source has not excelled to date is in the case of
desktop OSs. Ubuntu notwithstanding (it’s hardware support is bad even
compared to other Linux distros such as PCLinuxOS), Linux has a long way to
go before it’s usable on the desktop. My biggest beef was with the font
rendering and hardware support both of which were below par. The lack of integration
remains a bugbear. OpenOffice looks different from FireFox which looks different
from Gnome or KDE. There is some superficial integration which extends to menus
but that’s it. The toolbars, text areas et al look totally different (and
mostly ghastly) in each application. Support for new hardware is abysmal.
Other than the desktop, however, Open Source is on a roll and even there the
applications are maturing. 2008 will be a good year for Open Source software.
prashant.rao@expressindia.com
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