-> http://www.herring.com/rhdirect/news/sleeper.html
I'm tellin' ya, someone should hire Robert Thau and do an Apache division.
Just the brand equity alone...
RK
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SLEEPER SERVER
In spite of the multibillion-dollar Microsoft-Netscape battle for Web server
dominance, the free Apache server continues to dominate the Web.
By _Deborah Claymon_
Minuscule Microsoft? Negligible Netscape? If Apache, a public domain HTTP
server, wanted to join the commercial battle for Web server dominance, it
could win by simply presenting the numbers. According to the Web server site
survey by Netcraft, Apache is run on more than 41 percent of all Web servers
in the world.
That's more than four times the penetration of any Microsoft or Netscape
server. The number of sites running Apache now exceeds 300,000, compared with
Microsoft's 50,000 or Netscape's 65,000.
Microsoft has taken a mere 7 percent of the market, although its NT platform
underlies 16 percent of the overall server population, Netcraft reports.
With all its different servers combined, Netscape captures almost 10 percent
of the market. But it has yet to convince the Web community that paying for
its servers has a distinct advantage over the publicly available NCSA server,
which still holds an equal 10 percent.
The Apache Group was founded by a group of professional Webmasters to
continue active development of a publicly available HTTP server with "no
outside sponsors or institutional agenda to pursue." Unlike the NCSA server,
whose future as shareware is uncertain, Apache will remain free.
The people who created Apache had been writing software patches, or bug
fixes, for NCSA 1.3. The result of their work was "a patchy" server. The
official name Apache soon followed.