Microsoft has seen a 300 percent increase in the number of Web sites hosted on its recently launched Windows Server 2003 software in the last three months -- with a considerable amount of the new business representing migrations from Linux, according to a survey published this week.
The figures are a win for Microsoft, which dominates the desktop operating system market but currently rates a distant second to the open-source Apache, often running on Linux, in servers. Open-source software is not controlled by any one organisation, and can often be obtained and maintained far more cheaply than proprietary software.
The number of active Web sites hosted on Server 2003 tripled to 88,400 in the three months since launch, according to Netcraft, which monitors server usage. A significant portion of this growth has been at the expense of the Linux operating system, with 5 percent, or 8,000 sites, having migrated from Linux.
Entire article@ZDNet
