> In 2006, most webservers were either IIS on Windows Server or, believe it or not, NetBSD. In fact, the vast majority of webservers globally, like 90% or more, ran NetBSD
Do you have any sources to back this claim? I've always thought that (perhaps mistakenly) by 2005-ish Linux was already fairly dominant as a web server OS/platform.
Not asking because I think you are wrong -- I just would love to read more about this and couldn't find anything more than a web server survey from 2006[1]. The survey doesn't really mention specifics about any of the Unix-like platforms other than "Linux" or "Apache" (which I assume by Linux or Apache they are grouping all non-Windows OS-es together).
My interest: I'm a regular Linux user with some FreeBSD experience who finds the BSDs super interesting and their approach very admirable.
On my world corner, HP-UX, Solaris and Aix were still the UNIX workhorses we would thrust to put into production, with CERN being the exception where I used Linux in production.
Yet, even CERN in early 2000's while migrating from Solaris to Linux (my office had a pile of pizza boxes to be thrown out), most researchers were using Windows 2000 with Framemaker/Word for writing their papers, with remote tooling to access the devenvs.
I think it’s a question of perspective. In 2006 I think it’s fair to say that Linux was becoming dominant on the web, meaning that most greenfield projects would run on Linux from day one.
Enterprise IT was another thing entirely. At the time I was working at an Enterprise Linux vendor and we were very focused on these “Unix to Linux” campaigns. There was so much to do, and a lot of convincing needed to happen to get these business critical workloads over (accounting, payroll, ERPs, etc.).
Ironically, VMware ended up being more instrumental in getting Linux adopted by IT depts everywhere than we ever were. As well as Oracle with Unbreakable Linux, which was released that year.
> In 2006 I think it’s fair to say that Linux was becoming dominant on the web,
I don't see how that is possible. Dominant means a majority. Maybe by 2009 Linux still only ran maybe 40% of all Internet webservers, and that is being very liberal. So even by 2009, Linux was not dominant. In 2006, Linux possibly had 2-5% of webservers... if that. By late 2011, Linux probably ran 90% of webservers. It didn't happen overnight, it took more than a decade after 2001 for Linux to dominate the datacenter.
We ran racks of Linux servers in 2001 for back end processing. But our webserver ran NetBSD, like nearly all the other webservers, until about 2009. After 2009, perhaps all new webservers ran Linux, as hardware was replaced, but the Internet was still mostly NetBSD in 2006 with the rest being Windows Server IIS.
If you look at the graph of web server market share on Netcraft's site, you can see that Apache ramped up really quickly in the late 90s and stayed ahead of IIS until Nginx started making real inroads.
The vast majority of these web servers were running on Linux. NetBSD was a very niche OS from about the early 2000s on, and far from common before that. Up until about '97 or so most web servers seemed to be running on NT4 or even Windows 95 (which was in itself a fairly terrible idea but they were simpler times).
> by 2005-ish Linux was already fairly dominant as a web server OS/platform.
I lived through it, and I don't have any citation, but this is incorrect. Linux did not take over the datacenter until 2011/12. In 2006, the main reason for Linux's existence was to fix the things Microsoft kept breaking, also, it was nice to revive older hardware that wouldn't perform with or run current OS versions. IBM actually tried to switch everything to Linux right around 2006, but en mass grey beard AIX system admins revolted, and IBM postponed the "migration." In 2006, Linux was just not mature or stable enough for big iron nor servers for popular websites, and Linux certainly wasn't dominant in any space in 2006, except maybe the dev hobbiest space.
I don’t agree at all. Linux was fairly ubiquitous even in the late 90s. For example the entire line of Cobalt server appliances were Linux based, and they were a favorite in colos and shared hosting.
Linux was not omnipresent in the late 90's, regardless of a single server appliance. It was only in 2007 that any major hardware vendor (Dell, HP) even announced it would ship w/ Linux preinstalled. By 2008, NetBSD still had about 50% of webserver space with 30% run on Windows Server. In 2008, Linux ran maybe about 20% of Internet webservers, regardless of Steve Balmer's claim (remember how big the Internet is, i.e. it does not only consist of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft... that is only 4 sites... there were 31M websites in 2008, and most of them still ran NetBSD). A lot of file servers ran on Linux, there was big data being stored on Linux by 2007, there was massive interest in Linux, but Linux was not all there was, and Linux really did not take over the datacenter, where nearly all the hardware ran Linux, until late 2011.
But the status quo is, pretty much by definition, not extraordinary. I also remember "common knowledge" of the era as "BSD standard, Linux up-and-coming". So where's your evidence for your extraordinary claim that this wasn't how it was?
I think you're overstating a little here. There were definitely popular websites running on linux in 2006. I won't make any claim about dominance (it's too hard to find good data now and it's just a battle of memory at that point), but definitely some high rankers on alexa at the time were very much LAMP.
Notably, I believe Facebook was LAMP, and was already becoming a pretty big force in 2006. It's hard to find a good citation for that, but it was my understanding at the time they were.
I think it was pretty common among up-and-comer startups, really. Maybe not so much on the low or high end, which were still dominated by shared hosting and enterprise contracts at the time, respectively. Still, it's the year RHEL launched so things were changing.
First of all, you said popular. Nearly all of those 32m websites were not popular by any useful definition of that word.
At any rate, you’re definitely going to have to provide more than a stern tone to make me believe this is true as it’s either very at odds with my experience at the time or your definition of “nearly all” is very unusual.
And finally, as another commenter suggested, if your idea is that this doesn’t also apply to netbsd (ie. nearly all servers weren’t netbsd) the i dunno what to tell you. Some kind of bsd maybe, but netbsd? I really don’t think so.
It is quite simple. Linux took over in 2011. That is 5 years after 2006. We don't have to rewrite history to make Linux look better than it is. Absurd.
> Linux was just not mature or stable enough for big iron nor servers for popular websites,
On the other hand, I absolutely made no claims about taking over. That's not the argument I have with what you said.
But I was running, or involved in the running of, large and popular production websites in 2006 that absolutely ran on Linux in the datacenter. There were BSD machines in the mix, sometimes as frontend proxies, but the actual website software and the bulk of the compute power of the sites were Linux.
That’s the claim I’m making and i make it because i lived it: Linux was used by popular websites in 2006, regardless of your claims of overall popularity.
I don't understand what you're on about, dangling on a word. My claim is that most of the WWW, the vast majority of public webservers, popular or not, ran on NetBSD between 1994 and 2007, the rest ran on Windows Server IIS. Linux, if it had any marketshare at all in the public WWW space in 2006, was in an extreme minority, part of a single percent or very low single digits of the 30M websites available in 2006. Barely perceptible. Things moved fast, and by 2008, Linux gained a lot of marketshare, and HP and Dell facilitated that by shipping Linux since 2007, but Linux still only had about 40% of webserver marketshare in 2008. But by the end of 2011, it effectively gained the rest.
But you worked on a large website in 2006 that ran on Linux. So you were a pioneer. Satisfied? In what way does it offend you that Linux didn't have any webserver marketshare to speak of in 2006? It's nothing personal. You are not Linux.
So, if this is your claim, provide some evidence to support it.
Web serving is not my field but I've been in tech since 1988, and while IIS rapidly gained marketshare in the late 1990s, my impression was that by the 21st century, Linux was becoming dominant.
> my impression was that by the 21st century, Linux was becoming dominant.
This is just bias and rewriting history. Linux was popular among younger admins and developers. It was a verve among that generation. Many were running it by 1996, and any who did will have the false impression that it was dominant because they were exposed to it. And while Linux was in the datacenter by 2001, it was not used for web front ends, it was for running backend processing. What I am saying is that Linux had not been widely adopted by the corporate or industrial space as webservers by 2006.
If there were any public facing Linux webservers in 2006, they were in such a minority that claiming it was becoming dominant is only said with the benefit of hindsight, because by 2012, Linux did take over most webservers. But in 2006 no one could know that, because most webservers, 80% or more, from 1994 to 2006 ran NetBSD, and IIS never had as much deployment as NetBSD webservers.
Again, I am not talking about any MAMAA. I am talking about Joe's Electronic Shop, and Xie's Ceramic Hippos, and the vast majority of all the public facing webservers online in the 1990's were running NetBSD, because by the mid-90's, it became ordinary convention, thus no one said, "we should document this for historical purposes."
The UNIX Wars were over and BSD won, so there was no hemming and hawing about what OS to use for a webserver. It was a choice between a handful of proprietary pay OS (Windows Server, AIX, HP/UX, etc.) and the free BSDs. For whatever reason (stability, maturity, practicality, etc. etc.), NetBSD was the vastly more popular choice for webservers, right up until the Linux verve came in and fixed something that wasn't broken. Linux was just a preference at best and a fad at worst. It brought no new features (Apache 2 is Apache 2), was not more secure, though it booted faster, NetBSD never need be rebooted. Linux took over like Pepsi took Coke's marketshare, and there was no rational reason behind this. Today, one is as good or bad as the other. In 2006, Linux was not mature. I know this because IBM scrapped their wide-deployment Linux plans in favor of continuing to develop AIX, which as awful as it is, it was far more stable and mature than Linux in 2006.
Linux only got great, like, astoundingly great (which means as good as any BSD or SysV variant), maybe a decade after the Millennium. In 2001, no company, not even the small ones, were trusting Linux for public facing anything. Maybe Linux had small gains in the web space by 2006, but it couldn't have been more than a few percent, if even a fraction of a percent, of the web. In 2006, the web was nearly entirely Windows Server IIS and NetBSD Apache 2, with the rest in small minority sharing a few percent, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX. And Mary's Coffee Mugs Boutique was not running AIX or Solaris, would have cost a fortune. NetBSD was convention for webservers, and it was free, very well-documented, well-supported, had dozens of thousands of free ports available through pkgsrc, and was very stable, and a mature OS. So it should not be surprising in the least, because it worked, and Linux was not ready, and it wasn't ready because, though the younger IT gen was ravenous for it and crusading for it, the grey beards in decision-making positions hated it (I think because Linux arbitrarily messes with the established directory structure of UNIX, so things were not where they were expected to be, causing frustration among the most experienced UNIX & BSD admins).
I would bet, before Craigslist migrated to CentOS sometime after 2004, from inception and for the entirety of the 90's and the early naughts at least, it probably ran Apache on NetBSD. How the heck can anyone find anything about what OS Newmark was running except the man himself? (I'm fishing to see if Craig lurks here, but at 69, I hope he's lurking on a yacht somewhere instead). I'd also be willing to bet that Amazon was originally hosted and launched from NetBSD servers, but I'd also bet Jeff doesn't remember.
As I mentioned in another comment - it's bizarre how NetBSD supposedly absolutely dominated and yet there's absolutely zero documentation of that "fact", while there's lots of people talking about using Unix, Windows, and Linux at the time.
> while there's lots of people talking about using Unix, Windows, and Linux at the time.
Not so strange that the talk was all about OS with paid licensing. And I don't see lots of people talking about Linux webservers in the early naughts. Linux was in the news because it was interesting, but the news was about reviving older hardware with free OS. Linux made it into production backends in 2001 at the latest, but no one was writing about it.
And in 2001/2, I'm not sure Amazon was all that notable, still a small Internet company then. Also, I'd find it hard to believe Amazon began on Solaris, rather than Solaris being the first early migration (Sun had even better support than NetBSD, but getting the nines was closely tied to Sun hw). Amazon was initially a garage company. I guess it is possible Bezos had a hand me down Solaris server, and ran without Sun support (the hw was that good, Sun's excellent support was hardly needed), or that it was part of the initial investment, but those servers cost tens of thousands.
I'm really beyond trying to convince anyone that 1) Linux only went everywhere later, 2011/12, not in 2001/6, and that 2) NetBSD, for all intents and purposes, was and ran the entire WWW for a decade or more, ignoring IIS and the small amounts of pay unicies. I saw web audits of OS. No one saved any for future review and nostalgia. NetBSD was an incredibly popular webserver for a long, long time, all through the 90's and into the naughts, losing out to Linux sometime between late 2007 and 2009, by which time it had all but disappeared (or the web got massively bigger).
Believe it or not. I'm not sure what my motive would be for trying to deceive die-hard Penquinistas. If we can't find evidence NetBSD dominated webservers, then find evidence some other OS did, but don't trust Microsoft's BS. IIS was a dog and had some minority marketshare increasing by the late 90's only because no one gets fired for choosing Windows.
> And in 2001/2, I'm not sure Amazon was all that notable, still a small Internet company then.
In 2002? No, Amazon wasn't a small Internet company. It had been around for a decade; it had been publicly traded for half that time. Look at that article I linked - they were spending nearly $100 million a year on infrastructure! Their annual revenue was three quarters of a billion dollars! They were a household name: Time Magazine had already named Jeff Bezos Person of the Year three years prior, in 1999! That CNET article describes them as an "e-commerce giant"...and they felt comfortable betting their tech infrastructure on Linux in 2001, when you insist it would be another decade before it wasn't just for hobbyists.
(And FWIW, Bezos was already quite rich and successful pre-Amazon:
> He first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade. Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust. He worked there from 1988 to 1990. He then joined D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly founded hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling in 1990 and worked there until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president at age 30.
Amazon was also quite well-funded from the jump, with dozens of investors, including hundreds of thousands from his parents alone.
He could have easily afforded a Solaris box or two for his site.)
I understand that you're not trying to convince anyone of anything, because all you're doing is saying "trust me" over and over. Please understand that, likewise, I'm not trying to convince you, because you're clearly completely disinterested in fact-checking your own beliefs. Nor am I a "Penquinista" fighting for Linux's honour or a BSD Hater or something - while I have one machine running Linux, I've got another running Windows; I've run both OpenBSD and FreeBSD at various times; I'm typing this on a Mac now. My motivation in arguing and providing counter-evidence here is just to try to set the record straight for anyone younger who might be reading this, who wasn't around at the time, whose head might be getting filled with misinformation.
You have an axe to grind and I'm calling BS. If this was so prevalent, it will be trivially easy for you to prove it.
I was deploying Linux in production in the 1990s. A friend of mine ran an entirely Linux-based ISP in the late '90s. I was writing about Linux in the 1990s, e.g. here:
If what you are saying is true, prove it. Show us site reports, deployment queries, support conversations. Show us comparative reviews. Show us some evidence.
I am fascinated and I'd love to write about this, but at the moment, you have provided nothing and you sound more and more like a random ranting Internet loonie with every post.
Well, regardless of any citations this is very interesting anecdotal experience. Thanks for sharing -- good to understand a bit more of the history there. It's interesting to learn more about previous timeframes in which I didn't have an IT career.
I think this just isn’t measuring platform at all, though you can kind of assume they wouldn’t be much different. Apache could and did run on windows as well, though it was definitely an outlier case. But if you wanted to host php and you had a windows server you might wind up using Apache on windows, as far as i remember (and that was a use case for a client if mine around that time).
I definitely remember there being platform horse race info from netcraft around that time as well, so i wonder what happened to it.
Do you have any sources to back this claim? I've always thought that (perhaps mistakenly) by 2005-ish Linux was already fairly dominant as a web server OS/platform.
Not asking because I think you are wrong -- I just would love to read more about this and couldn't find anything more than a web server survey from 2006[1]. The survey doesn't really mention specifics about any of the Unix-like platforms other than "Linux" or "Apache" (which I assume by Linux or Apache they are grouping all non-Windows OS-es together).
My interest: I'm a regular Linux user with some FreeBSD experience who finds the BSDs super interesting and their approach very admirable.
[1] https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/04/06/april_2006_web...