'“There is no inflection point coming that will increase demand for non-x86 and Unix,” he said. Organisations migrating from those platforms, he said, will see Linux as their natural destination.'
One of the nice things about inflection points is that they arrive without the Gartners of this world noticing until it hits them in the face.
A lot of people running Linux at the moment do so because it's a cheap Unix-like OS onto which commercial vendors have migrated products such as RDBMSs. And a good proportion of those users are not over-fond of it becoming less Unix-like with the incorporation of systemd (yes, I know there are systemd fans who welcome a more WIndows-like approach). There's also a proportion of those users who realise that there are now alternatives to those commercial products which have less vicious licensing terms and which are available on other platforms.
Some combination of these factors could quite easily form an inflection point whereby there's a migration to BSDs. At which point there'll be a whole new slew of reports from the Gartners of this world assuring us that there's a migration to BSDs, that chroot jails are the new containers and explaining the reasons for it being a natural destination.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
