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

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.

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?)