Nmap Development mailing list archives
Re: Nmap Usage Stats by OS/Platform
From: Rich Adamson <radamson () routers com>
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 06:41:33 -0600
Let's start with the OS and service submission data, as I consider that to be the most useful.
<snip>
Total 2005% 2003% OS 1278 63.996% 65.1% Linux 295 14.772% 19.5% Windows This surprised me, considering all of the work that has gone into improving the Windows version since 2003.
Shouldn't be too surprising since a large number of Win32 users are interested in using the product, but couldn't because of well published incompatibility and/or other limitations. Combine that with a much larger percentage of Win32 users don't have a development environment and its easy to understand the above numbers.
Now let's look at download stats and see how the different packages compare. The last 9,143 downloads of Nmap 3.95 are distributed as so: 4901 53.6038% nmap-3.95-win32.zip 1839 20.1137% nmap-3.95.tar.bz2 1152 12.5998% nmap-3.95.tgz 679 7.42645% nmap-3.95-1.i386.rpm 318 3.47807% nmap-frontend-3.95-1.i386.rpm 138 1.50935% nmap-3.95-1.src.rpm 71 0.77655% nmap-frontend-3.95-1.x86_64.rpm 45 0.49218% nmap-3.95-1.x86_64.rpm This is a very different picture. Windows downloads are the majority here.
The download stats tend to suggest that a large number of Win32 users had at least some interest in the product, attempted to use the product, and are either still using it or elected to not use it due to the lack of a Win32 gui environment, driver issues, MS issues, or whatever. I'd also bet a lot of money on the thought process that a fair number of one/two man PC support/maintenance companies have looked to expand their business by attempting to sell security services, and have downloaded many different free products to support that objective. (Whether they actually provided any such services is probably questionable.) As a professional network performance and security person, I tend to use Win32 systems for almost everything since a number of expensive tools that I use only exist in that environment. I'm very comfortable using linux (have been since around 1992) and my laptops support triple-boot OS's for a number of reasons, but 95% of the time they are used as Win32 systems. We've worked at small to medium sized corporations in more then 40 US states since 1993. If the corporation uses a fair amount of linux/unix systems, we'll use nmap and nessus. If they use mostly MS products, we'll use nmap and other Windows based products. If we're doing external penetration assessments, we spend a lot of time analyzing nmap results. That would tend to suggest that I'm in the group of users that have downloaded the product, but lurking in terms of data submission, etc. Love the product; keep up the excellent work!!! Rich _______________________________________________ Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Current thread:
- Nmap Usage Stats by OS/Platform Fyodor (Dec 10)
- Re: Nmap Usage Stats by OS/Platform Rich Adamson (Dec 10)
- Re: Nmap Usage Stats by OS/Platform Nils Magnus (Dec 11)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Nmap Usage Stats by OS/Platform 4N9e Gutek (Dec 11)