Business

As someone who has exclusively used Linux-based operating systems for the best part of two decades, my attention was caught by a recent Statcounter claim that market share for Linux has reached 11% of all internet-connected PC use. Yet rather than being a cause for celebration, it made me immediately gloomy, because I know how this miracle figure has come about.

As Cloudflare’s data later confirmed, the Statcounter numbers aren’t good news for fans of free software. They are indicative of an issue that keeps those of us who manage webhosts for a living up at night – the constant and growing barrage of requests coming from LLMs, either seeking training data or carrying out agentic searches 24 hours a day. This issue isn’t debated often enough in conversations about the negative externalities of LLMs.