[plug] Lies, damn lies, and webserver statistics

[Leon Brooks]

>From SecuritySpace (http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200203/):


Domain  Month   Apache  IIS     Netscp  Zeus    WebSTAR WebSite "Other"
------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- --------
ALL     Feb      65.80%  24.91%   1.96%   1.08%   0.97%   0.50%   4.78%
ALL     March    65.64%  25.30%   1.86%   1.05%   0.92%   0.48%   4.73%
ALL     (delta)  -0.16%  +0.39%  -0.10%  -0.03%  -0.05%  -0.02%  -0.05%

.au      Feb      53.67%  38.15%  1.88%    1.32%   0.82%   0.29%   3.88%
.au      March    53.38%  38.82%  1.72%    1.30%   0.79%   0.29%   3.70%
.au      (delta)  -0.29%  +0.67% -0.16%   -0.02%  -0.03%  +0.00%  -0.18%

Lessons to be drawn from this:

While losing a little market share (ALL), about 280,000 new Apache servers 
hit the web. That's roughly 10,000 a day, or one every nine seconds, and 
still roughly two-for-one more installs than IIS. (-:

Australia is significantly more hostile to Open Source webservers and getting 
worse roughly twice as fast as the rest of the world.

This effectively coincides with roughly doubling Microsoft's gains in 
Australia, in other words, Microsoft is effectively taking (or at least 
reducing the gains in) market share directly from Apache, everyone else is 
basically a bystander in an absolute comparison.

Australia is significantly more hostile to diversity (except for Zeus) and 
getting worse more than three times faster than the rest of the world.

Assuming that diversity is good, and open source is good, something needs to 
be done to promote same in the Australian marketplace. Something like pushing 
Zope, Boa or Roxen seems appropriate.

Cheers; Leon