Getting a survey of what software is used across all of the departments within the Government of Canada would be an extremely exhaustive process.  I'm quite sure that there are many employees of the federal government who already are spending considerable time counting their proprietary licenses.  So, how is it possible to get a quick overview of how open source is being used, since there are no contractual responsibilities to report it?

With websites a lot of basic information is generally offered up from the server, and with a well established site like Netcraft we can do a quick audit of what a site is running and when it was last rebooted. You can also search generically for a partial domain like *.gc.ca to get all of the sites it has records on.  Netcraft is probably most famous for creating the survey of what webservers are popular on the Internet.  As of January 2009, Apache was at 52% & Windows was at 32%. 

In recent months we have been transitioning from Fedora Core systems to Debian ones. Our standard install is Debian stable "Etch", and the standard slate of packages serves almost all our needs admirably.

With one exception.

CiviCRM 2.1, which is (barely) still in alpha requires PHP version 5.2.1+, and the version that comes with Debian stable is 5.2.0. The way around this is to install the Debian packages from the testing distribution, which currently offers the latest 5.2.6 version of PHP.