LinuxWorld Expo Site Powered by Windows Server 2003, Aug 07, 2004

The LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco is the center of the Linux universe this week, celebrating the best Linux apps and advancing the cause of Linux in business. If you can't be at the Moscone Center, you can read the latest conference news at the LinuxWorld Expo web site, which naturally is powered by ... Windows Server 2003.

This is an extremely dangerous situation for Microsoft. The phishing threats and the growing professional chorus of disapproval for Internet Explorer provide Windows users with very good reasons to turn elsewhere, even if only temporarily. But Firefox is so good that many will want to stay with it. And once they have tasted the power and freedom of open source, maybe they will be tempted to try "just one more program".

While the open source community works on developing affordable substitutes for Cisco routers, Cisco itself is using Linux to power its Application and Content Networking System (ACNS), a caching and content delivery product for enterprise companies.

ACNS allows an IT staff to manage the flow of complex applications, audio and video over Cisco devices on a large network, with customers including Reuters, Siemens Medical Solutions and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Born in Mexico City, Miguel de Icaza was the driving force behind the creation of the Gnome free software desktop, and co-founded the open source company Ximian, bought last August by Novell. In July 2001, he helped start another ambitious project, Mono: a free implementation for GNU/Linux of Microsoft's .Net framework. He talks to Glyn Moody about Mono's progress, how Ximian was bought by Novell, and why he is so scared of Microsoft's Longhorn.

Linux-based hosting operations posted the strongest hostname growth in February, capturing the top three spots and seven of the top 10 in our monthly Hosting Switching Summary. Leaders Go Daddy (up 117K) and 1&1 Internet AG host the majority of their sites on Linux.

Domain registrar eNom, which recently accelerated up its push into shared hosting, was the fastest-growing Windows-based host. Yahoo was February's strongest performer among FreeBSD hosts, with a gain of 13.8K.

Apache has a significant percentage gain this month as register.com, a leading domain registrar with a domain parking system serving responses for over one million domains eliminated its Windows front end, and reverted to Linux and Apache which it ran previously. Barely weeks ago its largest rival, Network Solutions made a similar switch from Microsoft-IIS back to SunOne, nee Netscape-Enterprise, for its own domain parking system.

It has been a very mixed month for Microsoft. Although the top line figures appear to present steady growth in adoption of Microsoft-IIS, this masks some significant events.

August's Netcraft web server poll shows Apache up on top again with Apache being used in 62 percent of web servers reporting

In a June 2000 survey, Netcraft has found that Apache is by far the most used web server. It is used by over 10 million websites as opposed to the 3.5 million of its nearest competitor.