Linux Outpacing Macintosh

Read all about it here http://www.iht.com/articles/70026.html

Apparently Microsoft’s new licensing fees and open source initiatives are helping Linux use grow at an unprecedented pace. As for the numbers them selves "Linux had a 3.9 percent share of desktops worldwide, outpacing Macintosh's 3.1 percent." Looks like Linux still has a long way to go. I think its great that a open source operating system is stepping up to challenge Microsoft; much better than simply trading one monopoly for another.

I'd like to know how they gathered those figures. How do you estimate the use of something that can be downloaded for free from any of 1,000 places and legally copied to as many machines as you like, and that never has to be registered or recorded in any way? Is that based on sales of box sets? Downloads? Which download mirrors do they count? How do they know the number of boxes each customer installs it on?

Hmmmmmm........

Browser headers? (Both from the clients and from the servers)? In which case many might set their OS data to windows in order to maintain compatibility with judgemental websites.

Anyone ever heard of a mac webserver, come to think of it? :p

there are actually a large number of ways they can do it.. and it usualy has very little to do with technology although they could use it to help them. most likely they use statistical methods like those used to guess the out come of elections and approval ratings.. where they take a random sample of the population and make an estimate as to what the actual number is. the chances that they actually try to count the exact or even close to exact number of all the different os choices if very slim.