Fun with Google Trend - the Linux ecosystem
One of the hottest topic recently is the controversial keynote delivered by GregKH regarding how little Canonical contributes to the Linux ecosystem. Dustin Kirkland, a Canonical employee, wrote a rebuttal by playing the "our penis company is so small" card and painting the criticsm from GregKH as an attack from a much bigger and established competitor.
As much as I love to see an underdog succeed, I don't buy Dustin's argument at all. Look, GregKH is a smart guy. Coming from a competing company, he would have expected this kind of attack. Thus, regardless of whether he did so conciously or not, the slides centered around Canonical versus Gentoo, not Canonical vesus Red Hat/Novell/IBM. Gentoo as a smaller player win or tie in all comparisons, rendering Dustin's argument worthless.
Anyway, in his futile attempt to further prove his point, Dustin showed us this masterpiece:
The fun part about Google Trend is that you can interpret it however you want. As a biased Gentoo user, I see that
Ubuntu is doing well with noticeable spikes after released dates
Linux is getting worse all the time
If you combine their search volumes together, the whole pie is actually shrinking
Which is essentially what GregKH told us: Ubuntu is not helping the Linux ecosystem (actually, it's hurting, but let's try not to read into the graph too much).
Sigh. * shake head in disbelief *