In 2010, JOSA Vice President Mohammad Khamash presented an interesting paper on how Open Source – thankfully – dominates the World Wide Web. Do you think Open Source software is still making the rules for Internet technologies? In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web, we present you with a new and updated infographic for 2014.
In Mohammad Khamash's 2010 on the use of Open Source on the web, there was an attempt to explain why Open Source software is the backbone of the Web, since it gives life to the infrastructure of web servers and the operating systems used to run most WWW websites. Three years later, Open Source is even more widely used and seems to have become more beloved by people involved in web development.
Starting with the operating systems that power the internet, GNU/Linux continues to dominate the market share. According to statistics provided by W3Techs, Linux runs on more than 38.9% of all web servers. For the research, the same source used in 2010 was employed, with the difference that in 2010 it was based on the top 1 million sites, whereas today the data used has been expanded and its sampling base covers 10 million sites.
Given that many web servers hide their underlying operating system (most often for security reasons), statistics show that on 28% of web servers an operating system is running that can be described as unknown/undiscoverable. Based on previous (2010) statistics, which showed that Linux had a share of 60%, we can easily conclude that almost all of these machines run Linux.
Three years was enough to create a more substantial change in the software of Web servers, where we have a newcomer that took the second place from Microsoft IIS. You might possibly guess that it is another open web server code called Nginx, and today it has 19.9% of the market share.
This was not a serious loss for Apache, on the contrary, Apache's market share improved and reached 61% (+1% from 2010). IIS now, Microsoft's web server, has fallen to 14.2% (-5.8% from 2010) of the market share.
As for web development, and from the perspective of server-side languages, such as open source, the PHP programming language has reached an impressive 81.9% (in 2010 it was the language of choice for 75% of websites). Java, an open-source programming language, runs on almost 3% of the web, while the proprietary ASP.NET has a share that reaches nearly 18%.
For most developers, writing code from scratch is not the most efficient way to develop new software, because they have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. They usually use ready-made libraries, frameworks, and in the case of web development, they often use a Content Management System (CMS).
Thus, during the period 2010-2014, Open Source Content Management Systems became even more popular. WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal respectively hold 60,2%, 8,7%, and 5,4% of the total usage of CMSs on the global internet. Their total reaches 74,3% of the market.
See the infographic
