The indefatigable open source evangelist Bruce Perens is rousing the open source community, in an effort to regain a toehold in its PR war with Microsoft. Believe it or not, the latest front on which the battle rages is all around parking.Not just any parking, of course, but domain parking. Domain parking is simply when a domain name holder has not yet identified or does not know the IP addresses of the servers that will host their web site, but wishes to reserve the name for later use. The domain is ‘parked’ with a domain name registrar or one of their resellers.
So far, so straight forward. But recently one of those domain name registrars, GoDaddy, switched its domain parking host software from Apache to Microsoft. Since GoDaddy has something like 4.5 million parked domains, that had the effect of giving Microsoft a 5% market share gain in last month’s Netcraft web server survey.
That may not sound huge, but Perens decided he would do something about it. As he wrote: “I’ve created an Open Source parking site, OpenSourceParking.com. It will always use Open Source / Free Software for all of its operations. Currently, it identifies its server as lighttpd. I will be able to set a parking server up that identifies as Apache, as well. But the important thing is getting those domains off of IIS and Microsoft Windows.”
The idea is that if enough people park their domains at opensourceparking.com, it will “restore the market share reported for Open Source” in forthcoming NetCraft reports, according to Perens.
You can see the latest web server market share stats for yourself over at Netcraft. For more information on Perens’ campaign or to park your own domains there, visit opensourceparking.com. Of course, you could always help to boost Microsoft’s web server market share figures yet further by parking your domains instead at godaddy.com or one of its resellers.
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