Nine months following the heralded official release of the GPLv3 licenses, and with the more recent addition of the Affero GPLv3, adoption has surpassed 50% of my projections.

That brings up this question: What is the penetration or adoption rate of Ubuntu Desktop in the business sector? I do not have the numbers, and Canonical has not released any, as far as I know, but given that Mark and Co. have had a rough going trying to persuade PC vendors to pre-load Ubuntu Desktop on personal computers sold to the public, I doubt that the adoption rate is significant.

A new report out today from IDC, sponsored by Linux vendor Novell indicates that the current economic downturn is a good thing for Linux adoption. with more than half of the IT executives surveyed planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009.

More than 50% of IT executives in a recent survey said that they were planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009. “As organisations fight to cut costs and find value in this tough economic climate, Linux adoption will accelerate,” said Michelle Beetar, country manager for Novell South Africa.

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin says that Linux adoption is advancing two to three times faster than that of other platforms and that it will be boosted as companies consolidate their technical infrastructure during this economic downturn.

...despite the sheer number of projects that want to measure open source adoption, the numbers are bogus, because it's not in the interest of the people who have the data to release it.

Nine months following the heralded official release of the GPLv3 licenses, and with the more recent addition of the Affero GPLv3, adoption has surpassed 50% of my projections.

In reading through IDC's excellent report, "2007 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2: Project Adoption," analyst Matt Lawton stumbles across an intriguing observation in open-source software adoption. He apparently believes it is a weakness of the current open-source landscape, but I believe it is a strength. The observation? That IT departments do most of the services around open source, rather than third-party consulting companies.

Linux has outpaced Windows and Unix in corporate adoption rates, according to research firm IDC’s 2007 server market numbers. The pace of Linux’s future adoption could partly depend upon whether certain people choose early retirement, another researcher says.