What Will We Use on June 30, 2011?

Thanksgiving, as an American, means

1. Being Thankful for what you have.
2. Eating way too much food with family.
3. Planning what you are going to buy on Black Friday where all of the retailers sell loss-leader electronics in the hopes of you buying other stuff in their stores.

The truth of the matter folks, I have been gluttonous too much electronic. There is a backlog of unused the hardware I have in my basement. When everyone runs out to the stores tomorrow, I am going to hold my own Linux installfest at home. Here I will make functional systems that could not run Vista or Windows 7. If you live around Western PA and you would like to help deploy these systems, please express interest in the comments. Also, if anyone has any creative ideas for using recycling a series 2 Tivo, I would be very thankful since I have one of those in my basement too.

Whatever you do tomorrow, please read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ advice regarding Black Friday deals before hitting the stores. Better yet, stay at home and shop the Linux Journal store.

Recycling is one way that Microsoft will lose majority market share by June 30, 2011.

The Grand Finale to the “Road to Going Droid” story will be postponed for some exciting breaking news. Stay tuned.

The month of October was simply amazing. We had 3,170 unique ip addresses. When we compare it to our 869 visitors of September, that is over 350% growth. Admittedly, the increased traffic was due to a news-worthy incident that occurred in the open source community involving two of the editors of this blog. While this did increase the traffic, it was a distraction from the intended message.

This blog is only 4 months old but since we have so many new readers, it is worth restating some high points. I, Beth Lynn Eicher, bet $20 that Microsoft’s market share would be less than 50% on June 30, 2011. I am not insulted if you think I am crazy for making this claim. Every plan begins with a “YES we can!” vision. You do not need to agree with me to follow this blog.  Please comment if you disagree, especially if you are on the Microsoft payroll. All that is required is some genuine interest in intelligent discussion on Microsoft’s market share over the next 20 months. So far, the readers have been primarily from the Open Source community but this blog is also for Microsoft users so that they can discuss their satisfaction levels of Microsoft products.

The work of providing actual market share trend figures is difficult to do, especially since whatwillweuse.com is an leisure effort. I lack a marketing budget in which to buy professional projections which cost thousands of dollars. Instead, I use w3counter, a free web statistics service for websites and blogs, and follow their global statistics. In my opinion, w3counter gives the most accurate values because it allows regular people like me to allow the people in my social network to be counted. Competing products are only available to those with products to sell which I suspect is heavily weighted by what professional buyers are using in wealthy English speaking countries. Since quite a few Search Engine Optimization blogs have linked my post on how and why w3counter is useful to you, me, and everybody, I am convinced that community-oriented web statistics with w3counter yield excellent results. If you are a blogger of any sort and want to get some free statistics on who your readers are, I highly recommend w3counter, regardless of what operating system and web browser you use.

Alright, on with the statistics arleady. Here is the traffic we observed on whatwillweuse.com out of 3,170 unique visitors….

First Web Browsers:

1. Firefox      3,398      58%
2. Safari     815     14%
3. Mozilla     551     9%
4. Identification Blocked     335     6%
5. Internet Explorer     275     5%
6. Chrome     207     4%
7. Opera     70     1%

Operating Systems:

1.  Linux      2,524      43%
2.  Mac OS X     1,174     20%
3.  Windows XP     1,101     19%
4.  Unknown     415     7%
5.  Windows Vista     371     6%
6.  Windows 7     168     3%
7.  iPhone OSX     38     <1%

Click on the W3Counter logo to see the Browser/Operating system global report for October 2009

Notes on the global browser statistics:

Microsoft has less than 52% market share if you include IE6 which Microsoft no longer supported by Microsoft. If you ignore IE6 because it is a retired product as far as Microsoft is concerned,  Microsoft has only 38.39% of the browser market share.

Notes on the global operating systems:

These statistics do not break out full licensed copies of Windows 7 from the Release Candidate. Keep in mind that both MacOSX and Linux increased their market share during the month of the Windows 7 launch.

Notes on global diversity:

64.2% of the statistics are from non-English speaking countries.

Microsoft will have less than 50% market share on June 30, 2011.

TRIGGER WARNING: Victims of violence or sexual assault may want to stop reading. (I’ll try to be as mild as possible.)

Today, Tuesday October 13, 2009 the character known as “mikeeUSA” has been removed from sourceforge.net as well as the projects in which he was the sole contributor.

For those who do not know, mikeeUSA is an Internet troll who advocates violence against women and believes that it is his God-given right as a man to do so. He gets his jollies out of threatening women open source developers, as he has recently bothered the co-editor of this blog, Mackenzie Morgan.

mikeeUSA considers himself a significant open source contributor and has used his commits to his “projects” on sourceforge as his justification as to why he merits more than the female open source contributors he has insulted or threatened. This is not a simple difference of opinion as to what is offensive. mikeeUSA has been removed from communities, most recently the sourceforge.net community, for the extensively violent nature of his language and descriptions.

Since mikeeUSA thinks his code was of substantial quality, I downloaded a few packages and took a look for myself. There was one full program which was a text based slot machine game which displayed messages encouraging the denial of women’s rights. He also developed game add-ons, levels, and maps for already existing GPL-ed games. At best, these game components would include comments that would promote his agenda. At worst, the components would engage the player with his hateful themes. Sometimes variable names and function calls included evidence of hate-speech. Even if one were to ignore the politics of mikeeUSA, the product is not very good: low quality, dysfunctional, and not fun. The Nexuiz gaming community has repeatedly rejected his submissions. The reality is, just because you include a copy of GPLv2, it does not make you an open source rockstar. mikeeUSA’s claims of being a renowned open source contributor are unfounded. Now that the mikeeusa’s account has been disabled, it is unlikely that mikeeusa will be able to release anything with opportunity of claiming major open source contribution under a world-wide distribution ever again.

No one has the right to harass or threaten another human being. I don’t care who you think you are. If you have encountered mikeeUSA, do not be ashamed. As a community we will stand together to ensure safety in the open source neighborhood for all.

I am Beth Lynn Eicher, a director of the Ohio LinuxFest. As a concerned citizen of the open source neighborhood, I submitted a code review to sourceforge.net for and recommended removal of mikeeusa.  This was unpleasant reading but it had to be done in the name of neighborhood safety. The unfortunate content was the responsibility of mikeeusa’s alone. Sourceforge has over 230,000 projects they host. There two million users who release responsible high quality content that benefits the global society via sourceforge.net. Users who creates content that is against the terms of use are subject to review for potential removal. The volume prohibits them from verifying every project that they host, yet they are receptive to community feedback. Thanks to the reviewers at their legal team who also had to read mikeeusa’s vile code, my request for removal was approved.

I am incredibly grateful to sourceforge.net as they have proven themselves valuable parts  of the open source community by fulfilling the removal request. If you are in need of assistance, I suggest you contact sourceforge.net with the specifics. Alternatively, you can email me if you are shy at bethlynn AT ohiolinux DOT org.

To my fellow open source citizens, do keep vigilant for aggressive activity. I am not afraid to fight for the open source neighborhood to be safe and family environment.

Update: October 19, 2009

Now that the Ohio LinuxFest is over, there will be long awaited changes, stories, updates, content to this blog. Of course there will be an update on how things went at the Ohio LinuxFest. Please stay tuned. For now check out “Who are you” and “How to help” pages.

I attended a regional gathering of Association of PC User Groups in central Ohio. The Annual Meeting at the Ohio Midwest Regional was somewhat of a marketing event for Microsoft as the dinner keynote was a preview of Windows 7.  With that said, I won’t not say that Microsoft sabotaged this event since it was their show anyway.

To my surprise, they wanted me to speak. I told the audience that there are only three places where Microsoft continues to hold market share:

1. Desktop Operating system – Microsoft Vista was disappointing product for consumers. It lacked the 3rd party hardware and software vendor buy-in that XP had. Vista also lacked the marketing brilliance of Bill Gates. The Vista users I found were not happy and wanted Microsoft to give them Windows 7 for free for their trouble. I told them that I don’t know if Microsoft will do that but Linux is always free to everybody.

2. Web Browser – IE doesn’t ship with Windows as per EU law in Europe. How much longer will the US allow this anti-trust practice continue?

3. Office Suite – Microsoft breaks patent law with Word 2007. Sure they’re appealing but this will not be a cheap ride for Microsoft. I can’t see how they can release Word 2010 unless this is settled in Microsoft’s favor. Bottom line is this is far more expensive to Microsoft than the $300 million. While Microsoft ligates, Open Office innovates.

I was also there to represent the Ohio Linuxfest. We had a table and we registered folks for our show on September 25-27. We gave away Ubuntu 9.04. Some asked for more copies to hand out at their user group. It was an amazing opportunity to show people Linux for the very first time. Everyone liked that it was a forever sort of free instead of Microsoft’s idea of free where the operating system shuts down after two hours.

We had a free raffle a the Ohio Linuxfest table. We gave away a TomTom. It runs Linux and Microsoft did their best to shut down TomTom. To the the truth, TomTom still makes one of the best GPS units out there.

As part of the raffle, I asked people the question do they use Linux. Yes or No. The answer didn’t disqualify. All I wanted is some realistic data as to what people use who attend a PC users group meeting.

Here are the results:
30 answered YES
26 answered NO
7 answered “not yet” – This was unprompted. Does the yet imply that they might try Linux sometime in the future?
3 failed to indicate if they use Linux. Maybe they didn’t understand the directions?
Anyhow that is 44.7% Linux users in a PC user group. The crowd was about 40% women.

I expected to find a least one Microsoft fan through and through there. This was Jay Ferron who is a consultant who does contracts for Microsoft. He also the Microsoft 7 keynote. I tried to tell Jay that I tried to try Windows 7 Release Candidate but I can not get this thing to install on anything. It doesn’t get very far before it hangs. I don’t even get an opportunity to format the disk. I guess I will have to wait until mid October to by my Windows 7 copy. If I do get a copy of Windows 7, I will install it and do side by side comparisons to Linux. I told Jay this was my plan. I gave Jay a card asking him to contact me with my email address and the url of this blog. I have yet to see an email from Jay and his email isn’t public.

Jay tried to convince me that Microsoft was cooperating with Linux and giving source code. Now, I expected Jay to talk about Microsoft’s arrangement with Novell or the HyperV inclusion in the Linux kernel. Instead he talked about something that continues to baffle me.

Jay claimed that he met with Sue in a closed meeting in Washington state. Sue, the Ubuntu community manager, who works for Ubuntu the company. I asked Jay twice if he is sure that Sue didn’t work for Canonical. He insisted that Sue works for Ubuntu. In this meeting, Jay was playing the role of the Microsoft insider. Sue, so Jay claims, gave Jay a copy of Ubuntu 9.05 but it was not to be released to the community. Microsoft gave Sue some unreleased source code of their own. There were some unnamed Red Hat employees who executed similar deals.

Here is the real deal Jay and world.

Jono Bacon is the Ubuntu Community Manager. He was on vacation when the supposed deal took place. Jorge Castro is his backup. Both Jono and Jorge are Cannonical employees as there is no company named “Ubuntu.” Cannonical is the company that sponsors the Ubuntu Linux distibution. Ubutnu 9.04 refers to the latest stable release and it is not old as it was released in April 2009 – that’s why  it’s called 9.04. The unstable release is spun daily and it is called 9.10 because it will be ready for stable release at 9.10. Anyone in the the world can download 9.10 and its source here. This includes those Microsoft. It’s simply impossible that Ubuntu would make a closed source deal because that completely goes against what they’re all about. Since Jay didn’t try to name drop with the Red Hat folks, I won’t break it down but I strongly doubt Red Hat would be interested in Microsoft’s closed source software.

When Nick made the bet with me 2 months ago, he said that he hopes he loses. I am grateful to Nick because he held me accountable for the bold claims that started this blog. Indeed, Microsoft will lose majority market share by June 30, 2011. Nick has been busy moving to Pittsburgh, PA and looking for work. Maybe when he settles in we will hear more from Nick. Tonight, nick shows me two gems. 1. Yet another article which predicts the end is near for Microsoft. 2. Microsoft’s 10K filing, which is an investors report, which names Open Source as a serious competitor. Microsoft is running scared. Open source is the “intense competition.” Bring it on.

The Linux Dairy Council is the idea of Zonker of the Open SUSE project. Anyone who is interested in being a part of solving the problem of how will Linux compete with the marketing giant of Microsoft is welcome at the Linux Dairy Council. Zonker challenged the audience during his keynote at South East LinuxFest to become the media. This blog is marketing contribution. The Ohio LinuxFest is well.

I am going to the Ohio LinuxFest