Just the facts on FOSS market share

You will notice a link to David Wheeler's FOSS references page on this blog. Its quite an amazing collection of articles and well worth checking out. On that page, Wheeler has, for a long time, had an article which, in my opinion is quite possibly the most comprehensive quantitative study on FOSS market shares. As Wheeler puts it,

My paper “Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers!” is a massive collection of quantitative studies on free software, with the goal to “show that you should consider using OSS/FS when acquiring software”. It has a large set of different studies grouped into the categories market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership.

The good news is that Wheeler has updated that piece, (first put out in 2005). Check it out (and read Wheeler's post over at the Free Software Magazine for what has changed in the meantime).