April 18th, 2006
Open Source Parking
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
Sadly, you can still expect to shell out $29 for a day of parking near my office in San Francisco (crooks!), this is a different type of free parking - the aptly named “Open Source Parking” initiative. If you have a domain name and are not hosting it, don’t leave it on GoDaddy where it is listed as “IIS” or Microsoft server territory - the open source gang wants to count your domain as another one for the Apache team. They also will host a banner about FireFox and Open Source in general.
We say: Looks like finding a parking space is heated business, even online.
“Microsoft has been paying the large domain resellers to move their “parked” sites to IIS on Microsoft Server. Moving the parked customers of a single large reseller, GoDaddy.com, caused a shift of 4.5 Million domain names, or 5% of total server share from Apache to Microsoft IIS in the Netcraft report. This is an “appearance” change only, because the sites involved have no content. But managers believe figures like those in the Netcraft report, and act on them. It’s time for the Free Software / Open Source community to fight back.”
OpenSourceParking.com is a not-for-profit effort providing no-cost parking, using only Open Source / Free Software. When you use OpenSourceParking to park your undeveloped domain name, it helps in two ways:
* It restores the market share reported for Open Source: The Netcraft report will identify the parked sites as being hosted with Apache on Linux. Unfortunately, any other Open Source web server would be tallied in the “Misc” column of the Netcraft stats at this time.
* Revenue from advertising on the parked domains will help to fund political and promotional efforts on behalf of Open Source / Free Software.
