Alfresco, one of the leading open source alternatives for enterprise content management, has started a poll among its 35,000 members to see what operating systems are the most used. Guess who's leading? Ubuntu and Red Hat!

Among Linux operating systems, Red Hat is the leader with 35% of the votes, followed by Ubuntu with 23%, according to the survey. Suse, openSUSE, and Suse Enterprise collectively got only 13 percent of the votes. Debian had 15 percent of the whole, while other distributions received 14 percent.

Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer, said: "It's important for us to know which platforms to test against first. It's in users' interest to give us good data."

Among Windows users, XP is the leader, with 63 percent, while Vista was adopted only by 2 percent of the respondents. After XP, Windows Server 2003 is the most used, with 28 percent of the votes.

German users tend to be the most Linux-loving from all of the respondents, while those from France prefer using Windows. Anyway, the French and Germans are the ones who like OpenOffice better than Microsoft Office. We can notice that there is a mixture between open source and proprietary software here, complementing each other.

In the application server category, Tomcat led, logging 72 percent. JBOSS' entry stood at 18 percent, while those from Sun, BEA and IBM rounded out the field. From the database solutions area, MySQL took 60 percent of the votes, followed by Oracle with 14 percent and Microsoft SQL Server with 13 percent.

Ian Howells said about the overall results: "It kind of validates that people want to have a mixed stack."

Alfresco collected data on a six-month period, from July to December last year, with participants coming from 260 countries. Fifty percent of the respondents came from Europe, the Middle East and Asia, while 24 percent were from the U.S and the rest from other countries.