> 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.
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.