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Shortly after I wrote this month's article I went to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego. There, on a display table in the exhibit hall, I found cans of a beverage containing carbonated water, corn syrup, caramel color and caffeine, proudly bearing the trademark “Open Cola”. Five cents from every can of Open Cola will be donated to the Free Software Foundation. So it does matter which brand of cola you drink! By the way, the recipe for Open Cola is available under the GPL; see opencola.com.

Netcraft's July Web Server Survey (netcraft.com/survey) showed a huge jump in Microsoft IIS' share of web server software usage on 31,299,592 surveyed net-connected computers. After reaching a plateau of around 20% in 1998, IIS suddenly jumped nearly 5% to 25.88%. Apache reciprocally declined by 4.29% to 58.73%. Microsoft's gain represented about 2% of all active sites on the Web.

Netcraft attributed the gain to a single event: the conversion of domain registrar Namezero's servers from Solaris to Windows 2000 and from Apache to IIS, along with a related move by part of Network Solutions' domain registration system. Network Solutions also moved physically from Digex to Interland (where Microsoft has held a minority interest). “These large installations had previously been masking a general decline in Solaris share on the Web, which is now down four percentage points over the last year”, Netcraft reported. “Additionally, the Network Solutions site was by far the largest Netscape-Enterprise installation in terms of numbers of hostnames, and one would expect that Netscape-Enterprise overall share will drop toward the 2-2.5% it has in the active sites analysis over the next few months.”

The previous month's survey also showed a shift in Windows' direction, again at Solaris' expense. In that survey, which attempted to count computers rather than hosts, Netcraft found that 49% of the surveyed computers were running Windows. Linux accounts for about 28%. And, all UNIX-related computers accounted for 45%. The remaining 6% were non-UNIX or unknown. “As some of the 3.6% of computers not identified by Netcraft operating system detector will in reality be Windows systems”, Netcraft reported, “it would be fair to say about half of public web servers world-wide are run on Microsoft operating systems.”

Netcraft also reported that Linux “has been consistently gaining share since this survey started but, interestingly, not significantly to Windows' detriment. Operating systems that have lost share have been Solaris and other proprietary operating systems, and to a small degree BSD.”

The significant interpretation of the data, Netcraft suggests, is that Solaris is “being continually chased further and further up market by Intel-based operating systems, with Sun in turn progressively eliminating the other proprietary UNIX operating systems.”

—Doc Searls