Justifying the use of FOSS

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 16 April 2007 06:31

Opinion and Analysis

Apache's dominance of the web server space is an old story - the security firm Netcraft has seen to that with its monthly surveys of websites and the software which is used to serve data. But within that data, there are little things which often go unnoticed - how many sites are simply parked domains? how many are active sites? how many are secure servers? All these and more are taken note of by Wheeler and it provides a much more rounded picture of the dominance achieved by an application which was once called A Patchy Server by its creators because they could not come up with a better name.

Some of the other data that Wheeler has collected is interesting, to say the least. Despite all the criticism levelled at it, Eric Allman's mail transport agent Sendmail still remains the most widely used on the  web. Postfix, the MTA written by Wietse Venema, comes second. And when it comes to software providing domain name services, there is nothing but bind used most of the time.

In the case of scripting languages, PHP is well out in front. This, despite the number of security problems it has faced over the years. The most popular implementation of the secure shell protocol is OpenSSH, a project which is run by Theo de Raadt's OpenBSD team.

Among database software, MySQL is fast becoming the software of choice, with its market share growing faster than that of Microsoft's offerings. And in the browser market, Firefox has been slowly eating into the dominance which Internet Explorer enjoyed for a long, long time.

Wheeler has retained data going back to the beginning of the decade and bolstered it with more recent data, some of it from 2007. Apart from the numbers, he also looks at security, reliability and scalability, all using quantitative data. But I can't even begin to describe the value of this paper, even if I continued for the next few days. Read the whole paper and you'll understand.