In spite of all the unpaid advertising Microsoft Corp has provided to the Linux operating system and its commercial arms, Red Hat Inc and Caldera Inc, over the course of the antitrust trial, a chance comment by Microsoft group VP Paul Maritz reveals that the Redmond software company still doesn’t understand how Linux is being used. At issue was an interview Red Hat CEO Bob Young gave to the Washington Post earlier this month. In it, Young said that Linux does not compete with Microsoft’s desktop operating systems, Windows 3.x and 9.x, but rather with its server OS, Windows NT, which lies outside the scope of the government’s case. Maritz sought to prove that Linux must be installed primarily on the desktop, but his attempt to do so betrayed an astonishing lack of insight. He pointed out that only 3 million servers of any flavor shipped to customers this year. Even being absurdly generous to Linux and saying they have a third of that – which they don’t – it’s obvious that the majority of the 7.5 million Linux users are using it on the desktop, he said. What Maritz didn’t know (or failed to mention) is that Linux is lean enough to perform well even on a 486 microprocessor – by Windows standards, a hopelessly obsolete machine. Anyone even remotely familiar with the use of Linux in organizations could have told Maritz that huge web sites are being run on outdated PCs running Linux and being used as web server platforms. Because many of these sites run the free Samba tool which makes Linux appear to other hosts as if it were Windows NT, nobody really knows how many such Linux boxes there are. If anything, though, it seems Bob Young’s 7.5 million user figure may be conservative – and Microsoft’s own usage figures for Windows NT artificially inflated by Linux in disguise.
