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Open Source major force in driving “Massive Sites”

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According to the Infrastructure Survey 2007 carried out by Pingdom a web infrastructure company the role of Open Source software in driving the infrastructure of the Internet has been confirmed. Out of the 7 sites surveyed, based on massive amounts of traffic these sites service 6 of them run exclusively on Open Source software.

What brings open source software to such a coveted position?

• Most Open Source software is scalable, unlike many of their proprietary counterparts, this does not mean the proprietary software can not be scalable, rather this is a consequence of free source distribution which allows the programmers from around the world contribute and improve the source of their favorite software.
• Their are no licensing charges! Open Source companies they charge only for support not for the actual software itself. Hence many webservers are run by professional sysadmins who do not require to get commercial support hence can get the software and use it for free!
• Open Source software is more resource efficient! This one is harder to claim, but many Linux distributions especially server distributions hardly come with any X Server or any window manager since everything can be handled from the strong shell Linux/Unix has, individual services can be easily disabled/enabled, hence the resource footprint of the actual software is very low.
• Open Source doesn't require the latest and greatest hardware!

There are tons of other reasons, but these are the main reasons why I believe Open Source has been so successful in being the de-facto internet infrastructure software. Many people would also add security, but really I think, Microsoft has improved security greatly after SP2 and in Vista that its no more just an Open Source advantage anymore