I was pointed recently to Zappos as a near-perfect example of a company that brings the principles of open source to business. Its site is inventive and fancy (as you'd expect a clothing retailer to be), but not a triumph of design over utility. What's more, it's fast. I can check Web site responsiveness with some confidence, because our little apartment near Boston has 20Mb/s symmetrical service from Verizon FiOS (that's fiber, and pretty cheap, considering), and the speeds I get at the office I share at Harvard are more than twice that.

So I decided to see what they were running that site on, by checking with Netcraft.com's “What's that site running?” service. The answer was Linux. Zappos itself is in an Akamai Netblock, and of the 13 other results (all foo.zappos.com), the results for OS were Linux or “unknown”.

Then I decided to look beyond Zappos to other on-line retailers. Here are the results for the top ten, as listed by InternetRetailer.com, with sales volume numbers in parentheses. Results for companyname.com are first, and other results for each company are summarized in text (Netcraft gives results in lowercase):

1. Amazon.com Inc. ($14.8 billion): linux.

2. Staples Inc. ($5.6 billion): linux, through akamai.

3. Office Depot Inc. ($4.9 billion): the top result is linux for www.officedepot.com, but officedepot.com (without the dubs) is windows server 2003. Other foo.officedepot.com sites are a mix of the two and “unknown”.

4. Dell Inc. ($4.2 billion): f5-big-ip, though l.dell.com (Dell laptops) is linux and a couple of foo.dell.com sites are “unknown”.

5. HP Home & Home Office Store ($3.4 billion): hp-ux.

6. OfficeMax Inc. ($3.2 billion): f5-big-ip, with a mix of solaris, windows server 2003, linux and “unknown” among other officemax sites.

7. Apple Inc. ($2.7 billion): “unknown”, but the company uses linux through akamai for a number of foo.apple.com sites.

8. Sears Holding Corp. ($2.6 billion, includes Sears.com and Kmart.com): for sears.com, linux, plus some “unknown”, solaris, f5-big-ip and windows server 2003 for sears.com.mx. For kmart.com, linux (through akamai), plus linux (with and without akamai) for various foo.sears.com sites. Kmart.com.au is windows 2000. Most of the rest are linux, plus a couple “unknown” and one f5-big-ip.

9. CDW Corp. ($2.4 billion): the top result is linux for www.cdw.com (through akamai). cdw.com (sans dubs) is f5-big-ip. The rest are a mix of linux and f5-big-ip, with one windows server 2003.

10. Newegg: windows server 2003, though linux shows up in five out of the nine foo.newegg.com results.

Although that summation is far from a complete picture, or even a completely accurate one for this Top Ten, it's clear that the picture can't be painted without linux as the most primary color.

Resources:

Internet Retailer Top 500 Retail Web Sites: www.internetretailer.com/top500/list.asp

Netcraft: netcraft.com