UpFRONT

At the NBA's first three-point shooting contest, Larry Bird looked at his opponents in the locker room and said, “Who's playing for second?” That's the main question when it comes to Linux distros. Red Hat has had the Larry Bird position for years now, and about all that's changed is who comes after #1.

Recently Evans Data Corporation of Santa Cruz, California asked 300 Linux developers which distributions they would select for a web server or a web application server. The obvious answer was Red Hat. Coming in second were SuSE and Mandrake, each with 21.8%. As the chart shows, though, the question for developers really is “Who would you select in addition to Red Hat?” The average number of additional choices was 1.3 (for a total of 2.3 choices). Caldera, Debian and FreeBSD weren't far behind SuSE and Mandrake.

The survey's table of contents is on the Web at Evan's site (www.evansdata.com/Linux01TOC.htm).

Between truth and the search for truth, I opt for the second.

—Bernard Berenson

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

—Mark Twain

Honesty is the best policy. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

—George Burns

A closed mouth gathers no foot.

—Simon Murcott

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

—Abraham Lincoln

The strategic goal here is getting Windows CE standards into every device we can. We don't have to make money over the next few years. We didn't make money on MS-DOS in its first release. If you can get into this market at $10, take it.

—Bill Gates

Do we have a way for people who host web sites on Linux to build on [.NET]? Yes, we do. That's not to say our overall strategy is not to get those web sites over to Windows, but we will provide a way for those Linux servers to use .NET.

—Steve Ballmer

I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter.

—Nick Petreley

Storage is like eating. You can eat cheaper, but you can't not eat.

—Colin Ferenbach, on prospects for the storage firm EMC

It's a great year for entrepreneurs. The problem is that VCs haven't been investing in entrepreneurs, they've been investing in figureheads with no technology.

—Dave Winer

The only thing you can't do with open-source software is make monopoly profits.

—Jeremy Allison

The first thing that happened after we opened sourced InterBase was customers wanted to know how much it cost. The most important new feature, after open sourcing, was the price tag.

—Ted Shelton

At least, thanks to open source, the technology doesn't die with the company.

—Deirdre Saoirse

Hey, for the price of a distribution, you can have a year of Linux Journal.

—Evil Bastard, on OpenSourceRadio

People who whine that Linux user groups exist to “help” people invariably use proprietary mailers.

—Rick Moen

For every traction there is an equal and opposite retraction.

—Doc Searls

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

—Bertrand Russell

Nobody can jump to confusions faster than the Linux community.

—Arne Flones

The right way to do things is not to try to persuade people you're right but to challenge them to think it through for themselves.

—Noam Chomsky

all your apt-get arebelong to us. dist-upgradenow for great honour

—Debian Haiku by Marc Merlin

So, how often do people search for your name on Google? To find out, we made an ad on Google's AdWords page, then asked Google to estimate how many times a month we would have to pay to run it when users searched for each of the following names:

Larry Augustin: 0

Chris DiBona: 0

Phil Hughes: 0

Rob Malda: 0

Don Marti: 4,000

Rick Moen: 0

Bruce Perens: 0

Eric Raymond: 4,000

Doc Searls: 0

Richard Stallman: 0

Linus Torvalds: 1,300

Richard Vernon: 0

Bob Young: 0

And, of course, we tried it for operating systems too:

Linux: 4,284,200

Windows: 5,653,800

UNIX: 872,900

There is no charge to get estimates. Try it yourself at http://adwords.google.com/. There is no charge to get estimates.