I know Linux is continuing to play a larger and larger role in big business, but it’s always nice to see hard, cold proof that this is true. The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating Linux’s growth, published “Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users.” This report shows that Linux is continuing to grab market share from Unix and Windows and it’s doing it more mission critical applications.

Admittedly, the 1,900 people surveyed were both from The Linux Foundation’s Enterprise End User Council as well as other companies and government organizations, but I feel the results still were valid. And, unlike similar surveys, sponsored by proprietary software companies where you have to dig to find out who paid for the research and who’s actually being surveyed, the Linux Foundation comes right out and tells you ”

In particular, the Foundation, and its partner in the survey, Yeoman Technology Group, an engineering and management firm, focused on larger enterprise companies and government organizations–those with $500 million or more a year in revenues or greater than 500 employees.

These businesses are moving to Linux far faster than they are to Windows or Unix. Given that we already know that they’re interested in Linux that’s not too surprising. What was interesting was that conventional wisdom is that Unix users are the most likely to switch to Linux. While it’s true that Unix users are migrating to Linux, it turns out that, by a few percentage points, Windows users at 36.6% are more likely to be heading to Linux than Unix, 31.4%.

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