Re: Nmap Usage Stats by OS/Platform

[Rich Adamson <radamson () routers com>]

> 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




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