share for Windows NT Workstation remained at 38% with the remainder of the unit sales going to Unix and NetWare. In the Client OS market the share for Linux is only 4% with NT taking 21% and other Microsoft OS (mostly 98) at 66%. IDC currently estimates the worldwide server operating systems shipments of Linux licenses to be at 1.3M, growing at 92% from 1998 to 1999 in across-the-board use. This is a greater rate of growth than any other OS and well above the 23% unit growth of the average server OS. At LinuxExpo, last April in Montreal, IDC announced at the show opening that Linux shipments (all categories) have increased 166% for last quarter of 1999 compared to the last quarter of 1998. Linux dominates Web applications support for Web hosting, proxy, and e-mail.Installed Web server software NT versus Linux operating system hardware features and costs Feature-for-feature, Linux and NT compete equally. System requirements are also similar. Cost is again very much the same. Commercial Linux Server packages of similar power to NT installations cost about the same, although Linux offerings tend to include more added value in utilities and abilities. For example, a typical Linux Server offering will include MySQL whereas Microsoft SQL7 is an extra to be purchased separately.Linux, for the highly technical, is free. It is simply a matter of downloading and installing. Support is at least adequate and can be quite good from the Open Source community. The lower priced packages such as Caldera OpenLinux offer a pre-packaged solution at a far lower price than NT.Hardware requirements are also similar between Linux and NT. The low end and high end Network OS needs are almost exactly the same. Hands-on reports cite better performance from Linux using the same hardware, although these results tend to be based on opinion rather than recorded statistics.If Linux and NT are so close, in most technical aspects, why change from NT?First and foremost Li...
