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Market share and Open Source.: Page 2 of 2

I had an interesting problem today. I received a press release from Redhat in which they refered to themselves as "the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise", and thought "Oh really? I wonder if that is...
July 01, 2005

Not too long ago we surveyed you, the readers, about Microsoft, and found that even good surveys can have holes. No sooner did I get the results back than I realized that we should have asked for more detail in the "have you moved from Microsoft Operating Sytems to other Operating Systems?" question. Once you see that a majority of our readers answered "yes", then the questions come in a flood "How many machines?" is the big one that we should have asked. Moving a single machine for a pilot or to support a particular application is a different world than moving your entire architecture.

But I digress. The fact is that there is no way to quantify Redhat's claim. It is tough enough to calculate a rough market share of Linux because Microsoft keeps these numbers and requires a license per machine, but Open Source applications are much more loosely tracked.
So I'll give it to them, but I wonder what Novell and IBM - the companies I would consider their largest competitors for the title "Worlds leading provider of open source solutions" think of this press release. Maybe I'll call them and ask.

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