The Internet Operating System Counter for 4/99

AshNazg writes "The Internet Operating System Counter project has published results for April 1999. This is very important because it's one of the few ways of reliably counting Linux hosts. Linux is show to be the leading OS in the survey with 31.3%. All Windows versions combined account only for 24.3% "

Comments

Re:The method in this servey is wrong

[The Man]

On the other hand, exposed machines are where the most important work gets done. These machines run the Internet; boxes behind a firewall may help an individual or a company, but they do nothing for the Net at large. It's hard to prove what's getting used behind the masqwalls/firewalls. What can be shown is that microshaft a has 25% share of the machines that power the Internet. That says a lot, and for people who wish their internal network worked as well as the Internet, it forces a close look at technology choices.

another survey

[Frederic54]

here http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/
also the other method is not correct. you cannot really run a "commercial site" using windows 95/98 as your webserver/ftpserver/nntpserver...
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Re:The method in this servey is wrong

[eponymous cohort]

It's perfectly valid as a measure of the OSes that people trust their web sites to.

It doesn't claim to measure all OS use, just webserver OS use.

The method in this servey is wrong

[arivanov]

Despite by admirations to this survey (Its has actually been going for quite a while) I have to admit that its results are very wrong (as an OS count), because the system counts only exposed machines.

Machines behind firewalls, on 10.x.x.x 192.168.x.x networks behind NAT (masquarading) are not counted. And most of these are WinXX.

Overall, the results actually reflect not the OS count, but the server OS count on the net.

Power to the people

[CodeShark]

These statistics don't surprise me at all. Other posters have commented about machines not exposed to the survey, statistics counted or not counted, etc., but IMHO we don't need to split hairs in order to see the value of this survey. An analogy comes to mind...

Consider the major OS's as combatants in a "virtual world war." On one side, we have BIG MAINFRAME IRON (HP,IRIX,AIX,Digital Unix), sort of like the USA's M1 tank. On another side we have the beast with it's armies from Redmond, sort of like a Naval task force -- alot of power but hard to move around. A third side represents Solaris (something like the Air Force (?) Big, fast, and powerful. (IMHO mostly friendly to the next group). Now then, the "everyday people -- mostly inexpensive machines running Linux & the BSD families. We're sort of like the infantry but all of a sudden the infantry has the software (2.2X kernels) and hardware equivalents (newer 300MHz + hardware) of 25th Century MechWarriors with extended air-support. Smart missiles galore (Samba, Apache, etc.), and the best radar on the entire battlefield (/., etc.) Built in the back alleys of the computer world and assembled for the battle on all fronts. Look who's ahead:

1. Linux + the BSDs...........45.9%
   
2. The Beast (M$).....24.4%
3. Solaris..................17.7%
   
4. Big Iron..................7.5%

   Total of #'s 2-4.......49.5%

Which means that if Linux/BSD's capture just an additional 1.8% of the hosts [reached by the Internet Count] from these three sources, our "forces" will be as big as the next three groups combined .

As Linus himself said (remember, he was joking at the time!!) "total world domination!!" Power to the people!!

Interesting - look at the "market share"

[AJWM]

The numbers as presented don't show some of the more interesting things that can be learned from them. I took the numbers and worked out the percentage change for each OS, and then the change in each OS as a percentage of the total growth in the number of servers -- i.e, "market share" for the months since the last count. Here they are:

OS______________category_growth__'market'_share
Linux______________39.24%__________42.28%
Windows_95/98/NT___26.50%__________24.39%
BSD_Family_________23.47%__________13.29%
Solaris/SunOS______19.60%__________13.12%
Mac/Apple__________64.18%___________3.89%
IRIX________________9.77%___________1.94%
Novell_Netware_____63.62%___________0.87%
HPUX_______________12.90%___________0.50%
AIX_________________6.13%___________0.40%
SCO_Unix____________6.18%___________0.09%
Digital_Unix________3.39%___________0.06%
Reliant_Unix/Sinix_-17.37%_________-0.84%

(Sorted_by_'market'_share.)

(Sorry about all the underscores, but $nbsp doesn't seem to work, neither does the PRE tag. (Rob, can we have the PRE tag, please?)

The only OS that's actually lost sites is Reliant, but they only account for 0.84% of the change in the installed base. It looks like new server installs are choosing Linux at near twice the rate of all Windows combined, with BSD and Solaris up there too. Mac and Novell show major jumps relative to their previously installed base, but are still minor players in the server field (although Mac is catching up -- wonder how much (if any) of that is the Unix-based Mac OS X?)

go the linux!

[schmack]

well that's excellent news. less asp errors and unresponsive servers by the day! i'm currently moving all my web projects across to linux. it's great -- they don't crash anymore.

unless of course someone rips all my pci cards out of the box and then reboots the box [all when i'm not looking] -- i guess "mad max" has some nice tips on how to deal with this sort of behaviour!