It looks as if Schwab is starting to transition the schwab.com site to Linux. We first noticed Linux in use at www.schwab.com on 18th June, and currently two requests out of 10 are served from Linux.

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Grant Wilson spotted Linux World making a curious contribution to Open Source Advocacy.

www.digital.com was recently relegated to being a CName for www.hp.com, with the consequence that requests for www.digital.com now report the site as running HP-UX, a poignant moment for the company that brought the world RSX, VMS, and Ultrix.

Similarly, Netscape, whose founding employees pioneered the web server, replaced Netscape-Enterprise with AOLServer a few months ago.

www.army.mil has recently moved to MacOS X in its first switch since 1999, when it migrated to the Apple platform in the aftermath of a successful attack on its then Microsoft based web site. Ironically, Apple has recently replaced MacOS X with Solaris for its own Knowledge Base site.

The Washington Post has become of the first big name media sites to adopt Solaris 9. It is currently deployed in a load balancing pool where approximately a quarter of requests are met by Solaris 9 machines. To date, only a handful of Sun's own sites have been switched to Solaris 9.

One site that has not changed is www.sco.com, where people continue to delight in the irony of SCO using the operating system whose deployment they are seeking to restrict.

The US Air Force has moved its most public site away from the Defense Technical Information Center to a commercial hosting datacenter at Cable & Wireless. Microsoft will be delighted to have replaced Sun as the server platform. In 1999 Microsoft suffered the indignity of the main US Army web site operations staff not only replacing Microsoft servers with Macs but also giving their opinion of Microsoft product security on the front page of www.army.mil.

However, Cable & Wireless have subsequently announced their intention to sell or close their US datacenters, which may mean that www.af.mil will move again. Since this was not completely unexpected, it makes the timing of the US Army's move seem curious.

Ironically, Richard Stallman best known for the creation and relentless advocacy of the General Public Licence, has for many years run his own site using software produced under the more generous BSD licence. www.stallman.org switched from FreeBSD to Linux during April.

Note that this graph shows only Operating Systems serving less than 40,000 hostnames

The number of sites running Windows Server 2003 has overtaken Solaris 9, in spite of the fact that Windows Server 2003 does not launch until later on this month.

Solaris 9 launched in May 2002. However, Sun seems to take relaxed view about envangelising new operating system versions; even www.sun.com is still running Solaris 8. www.microsoft.com is at the opposite end of the product advocacy spectrum and started running Windows 2003 last July.