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Comment by CraigJPerry | Hacker News Reader

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CraigJPerry

What does Linux not dominate?

I can think of only a few categories: desktops, ATM machines, real time, SCADA.

What are the remaining big sectors Linux doesn't yet dominate?

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Desktop and laptop computers. Also CAD plataforms (that are a subset of the first, but an important subset).

A lot of broadcast TV is all windows/mac. Even for things like playout servers, automation, and real time graphics engines mostly run on windows or mac.

Point of Sale machines, machine controllers, etc.

RT is a matter of time (no pun intended). In fact hard real-time is already done using Linux and RT_PREEMPT is believed to go in the main tree soon.

Pretty much all end-user facing systems?

(Android barely counts as Linux for reasons discussed in my other comment)

Real time computing, routers, sensors

More routers run linux than you'd think. There's very little reason to reinvent basic networking and routing components and a kernel, when all the common SoCs are supported by a free OS. For the small price of stashing a source code bundle somewhere on their website (if even!) companies can get most of what makes their product tick off the shelf.

AFAIK, most routers use OpenBSD over Linux for security reasons.

I guess I'm only considering commodity, consumer routers. I'm sure you're right at higher levels.

For licensing issues, actually.

Juniper Networks' JunOS is a FreeBSD derivative.

What significant networking vendor runs OpenBSD? And I don't mean the low-end, low-support, OpenBSD on an embedded board from China stuff (so, no, Soekris isn't a significant vendor in the router space). I can't think of a single business or enterprise class one that does.

Cisco doesn't use it (IOS is home grown, IOS XR is QNX, NX-OS is Linux), Juniper uses FreeBSD, Arista uses Linux, HP uses (I think) Comware (linux), Intel & Broadcom are pushing Cumulus (linux) on their reference networking platforms, Dell/Force10 is NetBSD based (and older Dell is VXWorks, I think), Pretty sure Brocade is Linux, but they've also used VXWorks. Don't know what Hauwei uses (that wasn't stolen from Cisco, or course).

Not that this is authoritative, but I've talked to a couple of execs at companies who were using OSS platforms for their networking devices (Nokia, Juniper, Force10, Arista) and all of them basically said OpenBSD wasn't a consideration because of the open hostility the people leading the project had towards commercial enterprises. No one was interested in betting the company with the threat of a "DARPA funding" moment hanging over them, much less someone who was more interested in dictating terms and making "statements" than cooperation on business relationships.

[edit for punctuation]

I believe the OpenBSD community of developpers is not too concerned with popularity or integration with vendor's hardware. They are more concerned with doing things right (or, some would say, doing things their own way).

Nevertheless, there are some small companies selling things based on OpenBSD - even though, I'll admit, they are mostly companies started by OpenBSD developpers:

http://www.openbsd.org/products.html

You can also get some consulting & support:

http://www.openbsd.org/support.html

And, of course, there is always the strong possibility that some people are using OpenBSD while keeping it hush-hush and "under the radar" -- maybe even under the radar of their own management.

Make of this what you will.

I would certainly say "doing their own way" rather than "doing it right", and I would never say "wrong", for most values of wrong. I'm merely pointing out to the OP that other than the "side projects" (e.g. SSH), there is for all practical purposes zero uptake of OpenBSD in the commercial networking space. Yeah, there are some very niche players and lots of DIY folks, but that's not what was being alleged.

Small and medium sized business servers?

The profitable part of the cellphone business.

How has no one mentioned mobile? Smartphones/tablets? You know, the largest segment of general computation devices?

Android is based on the Linux kernel at least.

> How has no one mentioned mobile?

Because Linux does dominate mobile? Android is Linux and iOS is a *nux. (iOS is a BSD derivative.)

BSD isn't Linux. Android uses the Linux kernel, but not iOS. I'm not sure which dominates, though

In numbers, I'm pretty sure Android dominated (can't remember the exact numbers but Google should reveal them for you).

In revenue (app-sales etc) iOS dominates.

> In revenue (app-sales etc) iOS dominates.

Who made such research? I'm not sure if it's even possible to know exactly, unless all vendors who run their own stores publish sales statistics.

>unless all vendors who run their own stores publish sales statistics.

They do, thats one of those things that companies that are traded publicly are required to do.

Are all companies which have such stores traded publicly? I don't see a direct connection between these two aspects. For instance, in China there are various Android markets and I'm not sure all of them belong to publicly traded companies.

That's untrue.

Publicly traded companies are required to disclose revenue, but not required to break it down by source.

Neither Apple or Google break out the revenue from the *Stores (unless they have started doing it very recently). There are third party analytics firms that provide reasonable estimates though[1].

[1] eg http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/23/google-play-quarterly-app-r...

Mobile is interesting, because while the kernel is theoretically GPL you can't normally replace it with your own kernel without using a security exploit against your own device to get root. And almost all the userland is closed as well. It's far harder to run a properly Free operating system on a phone that nominally already runs Linux than it is to install Linux on a PC shipped with Windows.

On mobile, Linux is a thin shim of Free software in a proprietary stack.

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