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Comment by athrun | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve...

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).

> Dominant means a majority.

My full sentence was qualifying what I meant by "becoming dominant" here: "meaning that most greenfield projects would run on Linux from day one."

In 2006, Linux was not powering a majority of the web, but it was powering a majority of the _new_ web properties launched that year.

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