Dropped the ball
Ooops.
We blogged a story a couple of days back about the Novell / New Zealand deal, and some reaction from the National Business Review over there. Unfortunately I read the news story but failed to do more than skim the reaction piece; if I had I would have been shocked - shocked - by the article.
To wit:
While it is certainly true that the open source movement has gained much ground in the last five years, revolutionising some practices, the tools it has produced tend to fill specialised, if not niche, needs — and not even those with universal success.
and
While the open source software stack contains a large number of major applications, most discussion about open source centres on the operating system, Linux. The Linux component of the operating system sector is, indeed, growing — but only in a limited way and in back-end operations where the code being used is often highly modified and resembles out-of-box solutions in much the way reformed alcoholics and French Legionnaires resemble their baby photos.
Even in servers, its strongest point of contention, Linux holds only a very minor share of the market.
Thanks to Stuart Young for pointing this out, along with providing a load of useful links that debunk the article, for instance a post on the Greens’ own blog, some stuff on Slashdot and more blogging from Public Address.