I had an interesting problem today.

I received a press release from Redhat in which they refered to themselves as "the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise", and thought "Oh really? I wonder if that is true."

So I set out on a quest to find out if Redhat was within their rights to make such a bold claim.

I knew it would be hard, but I'm the "Storage and Servers" editor for Network Computing. If I couldn't figure this out and let you know, who could? So I hit the old research.

I found what has frustrated many of us for years is still very true. There is no good way to count Operating Systems installations, or for that matter any Open Source installation other than Web and Application servers that are public. For web and application servers, NetCraft does a fine job, even if some decry the methodology of only looking at public servers.

The problem is the same old one - that a single sale or download could represent a single machine, or it could represent an entire enterprise data center. Since enterprise software architectures are not something companies like to advertise - giving away information about your environment is in the I.T. Security Handbook under the heading "stupid" - so even polling is difficult.

Not too long ago we surveyed you, the readers, about Microsoft, and found that even good surveys can have holes. No sooner did I get the results back than I realized that we should have asked for more detail in the "have you moved from Microsoft Operating Sytems to other Operating Systems?" question. Once you see that a majority of our readers answered "yes", then the questions come in a flood "How many machines?" is the big one that we should have asked. Moving a single machine for a pilot or to support a particular application is a different world than moving your entire architecture.

But I digress. The fact is that there is no way to quantify Redhat's claim. It is tough enough to calculate a rough market share of Linux because Microsoft keeps these numbers and requires a license per machine, but Open Source applications are much more loosely tracked.

So I'll give it to them, but I wonder what Novell and IBM - the companies I would consider their largest competitors for the title "Worlds leading provider of open source solutions" think of this press release. Maybe I'll call them and ask.