I have a friend who is a total Microsoft zealot. We repeatedly get into annoyingly incredibly pointless arguments over the virtues of Linux vs. Windows. I mean, I know people have religious OS wars all the time but he's so ignorant of the Linux world that it's stunning. I mean, the guy is the smartest person I know, but when it comes to this argument, he seems to argue for the sake of arguing because he has no real statistics to go off of and talks completely out of his ass, or he'll quote one article he read somewhere that said one thing (probably not even what he's arguing) to justify his position. For instance, he says PHP is full of holes and is not professional software because it's written by hobbyists on the side, the language is not clearly defined, and there's no support for it. He says the same about MySQL. In fact, this is where the argument tonight started. He had a web service that crashed because one of his MySQL tables got hosed, so he blamed all his woes on MySQL (he claims he had to use it because the programmer he had do the site only new PHP and not ASP which he would've preferred, claiming that ASP is much more robust, is much better defined, is way more powerful than PHP, etc., which may all be true but his criticisms about PHP and MySQL are so unfounded as to be obnoxious). When I mentioned that MySQL DOES have support (you pay for it just like you do when you buy MSSQL) he finds some other nit to pick, which I then shoot down, so he moves on to another, and another, and another, then starts throwing out dubious statistics, etc. So I know it's completely pointless, but I just want to throw some statistics from neutral quarters (i.e. not Linux Journal, but like Forbes, Fortune, Network Magazine, etc.) showing how many deployments of: 1) Apache running on Linux versus Apache on Windows 2) PHP on Apache vs. ASP on ISS 3) Linux servers vs. Windows servers 4) Growth rates, industry trends, etc. No matter what I tell him he thinks that there's no way that Linux is beating MS in any way, shape or form. As an aside, the extent to which he is completely lost is evident in this anecdote. He's complaining how people can't code in 64K anymore, and when I point out that this trend of bloat is pretty much directly attributable to MS with its programming paradigms and overall bloatiness, he shoots that down like I was Satan for even suggesting it. So anyway, I want charts, graphs, hard numbers, quotes, trends, etc. Any articles that can show the actual numbers of what's going on in the industry with regards to Linux vs. Windows. Simple URLs will do. Thanks for indulging this stupidity. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]