IMO

A few people have expressed... well... "concern" is *way* too strong a word, but maybe "curiosity" is better, regarding the latest Netcraft survey in which Apache has seen a dip and IIS has seen a jump. Make no mistake: chipping away at Apache's lead is something that MS really, really wants to do, even if it's just for the numbers game and the PR aspects. That's why they are throwing money around to several hosting centers "encouraging" them to move their parked domains to IIS. It's also why they try as many tricks as possible to drive the numbers in their direction (hint: when you own a "community" service, it's trivially easy to quickly create thousands of "new sites" that show up on these surveys). Meanwhile, the ASF does *none* of these things. People depend on Apache because they are smart and they know better, not because we're "convincing" them to do so, or doing things to fudge the numbers. Just remember, unless you are running Windows, you *aren't* running IIS. And even then, a lot of really smart people are running Apache on Windows environments as well. So "misleading" numbers also serve another goal: "proving" that Linux/Solaris/BSD/whatever aren't really as popular as people say they are: after all, if a site is IIS, it must be Windows. Of course, this smacks down right in the face of what everyone sees and admits: open source is more popular than ever, and people are either migrating to it or starting off with it. And if someone is using Linux/Solaris/BSD/whatever, then they aren't going to be using IIS; maybe not Apache, but certainly not IIS. What's more interesting to me, in addition to the fact that Apache still has a commanding "lead" (whatever that means), is the fact that people who know, people whose business depend on the web, far and away rely on Apache over IIS. Apache handles much more traffic, by far, than IIS, and the traffic of high-end, "important" sites... Apache is popular because of what it *is* , not because of anything we do to "push it." Update: counter-point