• BRAZIL

Counting Users

2005-07-08

When statistician John Williams asked about estimating the number of GNOME users, we turned to Dan Kusnetzky at IDC to find out their estimate of Linux client operating environment shipments. IDC projects in 2004 there were approximately 4.1 million revenue producing copies of Linux delivered.



"If one considers the installed base (shipments minus retirements), then the paid Linux client operating environment software population is 7.8 million copies" Mr. Kusnetsky told us. Non-paid copies, he said, are likely to add about 2.5 million to that total installed base.

While there is no available count of those users running GNOME in the IDC figures, there are known reference deployments - telecentros in Brazil, school and govenment offices in Spain, police and animation houses in the U.S. Retail and financial companies (some on thin clients) are said to be using GNOME, but have asked their vendors not to publicize names.

With a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 25% for Linux on the desktop and a differential for OpenSolaris, we'll leave it to the statisticians to verify which way the wind is blowing.