Credit: Netcraft

SOME people just don't investigate before writing. They prematurely mourn a demise of Apache (the Web server) even though there is no demise and nothing to really mourn. Netcraft has finally produced a better graph (as shown above) to show Microsoft exploiting parked domains to make Apache look bad. This is not unprecedented and the peaks in the graph represent similar events that involved GoDaddy, for example.

"...whoever claimed that Apache was having woes or that Free software was losing in servers space should probably post a correction."Dr. Glyn Moody says he "spoke to Jim Jagielski, who has an impressive entry in Wikipedia that shows him to be well placed to comment on the Apache Web server project" (note that he is a Microosft guy now, having sold out for a high salary).

Moody wrote: "When I asked him whether he was worried that the long and glorious reign of the Apache Web server might be over, he pointed out that the graph where Microsoft had done well was the "Web server developers: Market share of all sites". In other words, it simply counted every Web site it could find, whether or not that site was important or even active. Netcraft's analysis confirms that the big jump in Microsoft's market share was down to almost a single company:

'Microsoft gained a staggering 48 million sites this month, increasing its total by 19% — most of this growth is attributable to new sites hosted by Nobis Technology Group.'

"As Jagielski notes, the second and third Netcraft graphs, "Web server developers: Market share of active sites" and "Web server developers: Market share of the top million busiest sites", show a rather different story. In the former, Microsoft made a small gain of 0.18%, while in the latter its growth was negative - -0.10%. In fact, the real star of the latest Netcraft survey is the open source Web server Nginx: it gained an extra 0.60% of the total Web server market, 1.49% of the active sites, and 1.55% of the million busiest sites."

So whoever claimed that Apache was having woes or that Free software was losing in servers space should probably post a correction. Microsoft is a master of gaming statistics and we showed several times before that Microsoft does this very consciously and deliberately. Right now, for example, Microsoft is lying about so-called 'sales' of Vista 8, using bogus numbers, as usual. One response said: "Microsoft will have you believe that the new Windows 8 operating system is doing great in sales and that Linux is not actually gaining any solid ground, but it's difficult to tell what is happening on the market without any real data. So we turn to the only online shop that has enough sales to provide an accurate picture."

"I've never used Windows XP, because I've run Linux on all my PC systems for about 15 years," wrote this one journalist in a new article. But since many computers come with Windows preinstalled and computers with old versions of Windows still count as "8", surely Microsoft can lie and try to defend the lie. ⬆