The OS Of The Internet

TCP/IP networking and the Internet was originally developed on Unix systems, and most of the high-power networking in the world is done on Unix systems. The OSI++ Counter indicates that about 75% of the web servers on the net are Unix boxes. In fact, Linux has the largest market share for the entire Internet, running 25.7% of the news servers, 26.9% of the web servers, and 33.7% of the FTP servers in the world. (If you combine Windows 95/98 with Windows NT, Windows is second to Linux in both web and FTP servers. Solaris, a Unix variant, is the number two news server.)

Linux provides not only extremely fast and reliable networking, but dozens of major and minor network services are usually provided when you get Linux. Web servers, file and print servers, ftp servers, time servers, NIS servers, IRC servers, News servers, compute servers, and more are available for free or very little cost. This includes Apache, the most widely-used webserver on the planet (with over 60% market share).

Much of the development of the new IPv6 specification is being done on Linux systems, because of both the low cost and the ease of development of the system code. See The Linux IPv6 Page for further information.

In fact, a large fraction of all experimental networking, perhaps most, is done on Linux, in no small part due the the open source code. Linux provides a wide variety of unique networking methods.