Debian Fastest-Growing Distro, Says Netcraft

Oskuro writes "According to this story at news.netcraft.com, Debian was the fastest growing distribution in the last 6 months, closely followed by SuSE and Gentoo. RedHat, while still reigning, has started to lose sites in Netcraft's survey after they announced the end of support for their desktop releases. The survey is based on the stats from webservers which include the distribution name in their webserver's header." Maybe it would grow even faster when Java issues are worked out -- read more below on that.

adamy writes "For people like me that use both Free/Open Source software and Java, the two have come together with two major exception: The Java Virtual Machine and the Base Libraries. Seems the folks trying to get Java packages ready for Sarge could have listed the issues. This is an interesting example of dependency tree pruning: Several packages are orphaned because they depend on Ant, which depends on Swing. Swing has been lower priority for the Classpath because most of the java pacakages are server side or lack a UI componenet."

Comments

Free Market, baby!

[grub]

This illustrates perfectly how the free-market can work without overbearing monopolistic influence: Red Hat ends support for certain software, users can (and apparently do) go elsewhere.

Cutting support in a proprietary environment means a forced upgrade or outright migration which would cost a bundle. In the free software world this could just be a lateral shift, nothing more than a speed bump.

Consider this: in the very odd chance SCO wins lawsuits and Linux crumbles there wouldn't be much involved to move Linux web servers over to *BSD as they're likely all running Apache/PHP/*SQL anyhow.