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But of course you can't describe any of those as being mass market in the same way as a hardware MP3 player. In the grand scheme of things very few people ever buy a webserver, email server, name server or programming language. These could just as easily be considered niche market products.


You are kidding, right? There are an order of magnitude more servers running Apache than there are MP3 players.


I don't think you can define mass market is just being about how many "products" are "sold" though.

I would be willing to bet that well over 90% of the installations of Apache, Sendmail and BIND were not due to someone deciding on the particular server in question. They are in use because someone installed a Linux distibution or Unix/BSD product that used the server in question by default. These people no more chose to use Apache than 99% of Windows administrators chose to use IIS.

I my eyes for something to be mass market it has to be purchased in large numbers by consumers.
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