Linux PC's increase Windows market share
PC World | at | by Mike
Linux may be shipping on a growing number of PCs sold in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. But about 80 percent of PCs shipped with the open source operating system this year will eventually run pirated versions of Windows, industry research firm Gartner estimates.
The high price of Windows may be driving vendors in countries like China and Russia to ship Linux on as many as 40 percent of their PCs, but many of these systems will not ultimately run the free operating system, Gartner says in a recent report.
In fact, this high percentage of Linux sales is being driven by the availability of cheap pirated copies of Windows rather than a desire to run Linux.