Thanks Derek! A major disagreement is brewing about exactly what share of the server market Linux actually holds, and Microsoft is again an active player in the debate. A recently released Gartner Dataquest report, sponsored by several companies including Microsoft, found that just 8.6 percent of server shipments in the U.S. during the third quarter of 2000 were Linux-based. Another interesting finding was that when so-called "white box," or non-branded, server purchases were excluded and only branded server purchases considered, Linux's share of the market fell to just 6 percent in the third quarter of 2000. "Linux continues to be on a growth path, and Gartner Dataquest believes the demand for Linux-based servers will grow to 10 percent of server shipments in 2001," the report stated. But these numbers fly in the face of other research reports from such groups as International Data Dan Kusnetzky, an IDC analyst, told eWEEK that his company's provisional figures for 2000 showed that Linux as a server operating system--regardless of the operating system or machine on which it was installed--represented 27 percent of the total market, behind Windows at 41 percent.