I came across an interesting report last month on the Web site of Internet research and services company Netcraft. This Web site is home to the always-intriguing “Whats that site running? …” search box, from which you can divine fun facts, such as whether Microsoft is running Hotmail servers on FreeBSD.
According to Netcrafts numbers, which are based on the flavor of Linux as listed on Apache Web server headers, Red Hats Fedora distribution has leapt to nearly match SuSE Linux in active sites.
These figures must be taken with a grain of salt—according to Netcraft, only about a quarter of the Linux hosts the company monitors report their distribution in their Web server headers. However, Netcrafts figures suggest that through Fedora, Red Hat has been able to maintain its prominence while pulling in considerable licensing fees for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
It will be interesting to see whether Fedora begins cutting significantly into RHELs market share—and Red Hats revenue—or whether the fast development pace and short version life that Red Hat has built into Fedora ends up burning adopters and sending them back to RHEL, or elsewhere.
For more information, go to news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/14/
fedora_makes_rapid_progress.html.