Netcraft: Open Source Parking Spoofing Headers to Benefit Apache

“An open source initiative to reverse gains for Microsoft web
server software appears to be using edited server headers to try
and improve the showing of the Apache web server. Sites using the
Open Source Parking service report that they are running on Apache,
but appear to actually be hosted on lighttpd. Both Apache and
lighttpd are open source web servers, but Apache leads in the
Netcraft survey with a 59 percent market share, while lighttpd is a
newcomer with just 1.2% share.

“Open Source Parking was formed last year by Linux evangelist
Bruce Perens to counter a 5 percent market share gain by Microsoft
in the April 2006 survey, when domain registrar Go Daddy shifted
4.5 million parked domains from Linux to Windows Server 2003. The
project’s goals are to increase the market share for open source
software and generate revenue from advertising on the parked
domains to fund political efforts on behalf of the open source
community. While parked domains can be challenging to track
accurately, there is no evidence that the effort has made any
impact on web server market share…”

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