So domain registrar GoDaddy recently decided to move 4.4 million parked domain names (Web addresses that don't have sites yet) from GNU/Linux to Windows. Does that mean that the company is anti-Linux? Maybe, but GoDaddy certainly isn't against free software -- it just made a U.S. $10,000 donation to the OpenSSH project.
There are two main points to make about this situation -- or rather, what is implied in this situation. The first is that every company that switches to Microsoft products is not against Linux, free software, or any of the other pro-freedom, anti-Microsoft factions or communities. It's a business deal, and one that I bet Microsoft sweetened with discounts so deep that you might wonder why they bother selling software at all. Examine the situation: GoDaddy is the world's largest domain registrar, and switching over their parking service to Microsoft means a more than 5% market share jump in the Netcraft monthly survey. If you were a rich corporation like Microsoft, wouldn't you do everything in your power to get that huge chunk of market share in one fell swoop? I won't lie -- I'd do it.
As an aside, these are parked domains. Parked as in "not in use right now, and might never be." Parked as in when they go live someday, they will be hosted on a real Web server that may or may not be running Windows.
The second main point is that free software isn't Linux. The Linux kernel may be free software, but it's not the only show in town. It's several times smaller than the OpenOffice.org codebase and smaller than each of the BSD operating systems and OpenSolaris -- all of these are free software projects. If GoDaddy had switched to FreeBSD from GNU/Linux, would there still be an uproar about it from the Linux peanut gallery? I think there probably would be, but perhaps on a different scale and with different people involved.
I can't help but think that this GoDaddy donation is partly just PR meant to offset the impression that they are pro-Microsoft on account of this domain parking deal. They don't want to lose customers that want to host on GNU/Linux, like EV1 did when they bought one of SCO's Linux licenses a few years back. I can understand that, and to a certain extent, the motive behind the donation doesn't really matter. What matters is, OpenSSH is getting some corporate donations from companies that realize the benefit of monetary support of free software projects. This is the second such donation, the first having come from the Mozilla Foundation a few weeks ago. Another 8 more $10,000 donations and OpenBSD/OpenSSH will have reached its operational funding goal of $100,000.
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