M$ Lies Again! at Robert Pogson

Last week a story was making the rounds that M$ was eating GNU/Linux’s lunch in the server market. Now, it turns out, the source was M$! See the follow-up at Linux.com. I found the story unbelievable but it somewhat modelled the increase in M$ domains on Netcraft.com, so it was hard to refute. Thanks, Joe Barr! In fact, according to IDC,

Linux servers posted the fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth, with year-over-year revenue growth of 19.0%, for a total of $1.8 billion in the quarter. Linux servers now represent 13.6% of all server revenue, up from 12.1% a year ago.

Here we went from 0 to 5 in two months of infinite growth!

This is yet another example of where M$ feels the need to spread FUD because its products are not competitive. Were I work we went from one M$ server not in use to 5 GNU/Linux servers providing amazing resources. We can count on those servers to give us an abundance of content even when the connection to the Internet is down or slow (frequent occurrence). Services we get from our GNU/Linux servers:

DHCP
DNS
HTTP
NTP
NFS
CUPS
ESD
XDMCP
X
MYSQL
AUTH
POP3
SMTP

Our local web server is amazing:

Local copy of part of Gutenberg.org (10000 books indexed with Swish-e)
Searchable image gallery
Local copy of our webpage, soon to be public
Tutorials, manuals and course management for IT courses for high school

Our servers just keep ticking. No forced reboots since the summer. Eat your heart out, M$!

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.