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Will Open Source Lose the Battle for the Web?
snotty writes "A well written article by Ganesh Prasad over at linuxtoday arguing that the shift towards web services has reduced the attractiveness of the current generation of Open Source web products. He talks about the market share decrease in Apache. Also mentions how .NET, Microsoft, Sun, Java, and Open Source Software fit into the picture." I think that the decrease in Apache's share is a red herring, but the bigger picture of web services is a troubling one.
Wake up... complacency is Microsoft's best friend. Just assume we're winning already and suddenly we'll find they've stolen the goalposts and the spectators, moved to the next field over, built a stadium & are making millions from the pay-per-view market. Zealotry, and a blind preference for whatever version of the story puts OSS/Free software in the best light, gets us nowhere.
> The real question is how the Open Source
> community should respond. You can quote me
> on this one, if we simply stand behind
> reliability and laugh at Microsoft's security
> holes and crashes, WE ARE TOAST.
Very well spoken and I agree with your points.
I have been working as a professional unix software dev for over 15 years now.
I love unix and open source, but I feel that, in general, a lot of the open source that is out there is nowhere near prime time.
It has been very frustrating for me, as I think that there are some really smart people working in unix and open source. I think that ego and other stupid not-invented-here (TM) mentalities have REALLY hurt the unix and open source communities in general.
As much as I loathe M$, I have to give them credit for a couple of things:
-consistency of user interface
Yeah, I think skins are cool and everything,
but in the end, most users want a consistent
and useful user interface and could give
a rats ass about the GUI wars that unix has
had forever (one of my major pet peaves).
-more money and effort into producing usable
products.
I'm not trying to defend M$, because they
certainly have more than their fair share
of really evil and stupid bugs, but the
perception on the part of the user is
that of a stable, consistent and
full-featured environment and suite of
software.
-incredible marketing.
Joe User could care less about us thumbing
our noses at M$. They want consistent,
useful and good products.
Some areas that I think unix/linux/open source community requires some major work on:
-consistent user interface
The X guys REALLY dropped the ball here by
saying that they are not specifying a look
and feel.
I think that having a dozen different GUI
toolkits is not only ridiculous, it is
harmful in the end.
If a particular [dominant?] toolkit doesn't
cut the mustard, have a design and revamp
review to get things right rather than
coming up with YAFGT (Yet Another F****ng
GUI Toolkit).
-let's get some good fonts
The standard X font set is pretty bad.
-some good UI designs. I've seen some pretty awful stuff and concepts that seem to go out of their way to make themselves different from what people are used to using. Being different/inconsistent is a BAD idea in UI.
-getting coding standards higher and having better design and code review processes.
There are a lot of newbie programmers out there that contribute a lot of code that is probably not suitable to go into production software...
-It almost seems as though the open source community needs a seasoned and very smart benevolent dictator to say what is ok and what is not.
-better documentation in the unix kernel sources and header sources. Some of it is just awful.
It's not all bad; I've seen lots of wonderful, intuitive and useful tools over the years.
In the end, a lot of the code that is crap will die off anyhow; sometimes it is just a painful ride to get there...
-Ralph
The percentage of IIS versus Apache is soon becoming irrelevant. What is important is the percentage of Servlet/JSP versus .NET/ASP sites. Which is kind of hard (impossible) to measure using Netcraft by the way.
One of the most succesful Servlet engines now is Tomcat, which is also open source coming from the Apache Jakarta project. I don't see any indication at the moment that the number of Servlet/JSP/J2EE sites is dropping in favour of ASP or .NET. No reason to worry yet.
Apache decreased, what, 1.5% or something? This is somehow a signal of the end of Open Source? When Microsoft loses a dime a share, does that signal its imminent demise too?
Let's get real.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
What would a user rather have -- a free server that does plain webserving, or a moderately priced one that does webserving plus e-commerce? Faced with such an adversary, does a plain webserver stand a chance, much less one that is virtually stagnant? True, the dramatic drop in Apache's market share comes from just two large ISPs, but will they be the only ones to switch?
.net people. You know, the people over at MS that think we want to plug in our websites like our TV sets, pay metered fees to a webservices provider, and pretend we are actually running a business.
I don't know about you, but I think this guy is a shill for the
I'd rather run my own shit web-server wise, and then have someone like Loudcloud style business model advise me on the e-commerce and user interface and stuff like that - then do it myself.
So many companies are going bust these days, outsourcing the very marketing and user interface of one's e-business is like getting one's automotive steel supply from a steelmaker that is 40% likely to go bankrupt in the next year.
Linux et al is for the radical libertarian survivors out there. Like the Ford corporation, which was one of the first vertical integration innovators, with control of its supply chain, you should know from mouth to anus what your company, and industry, is up to at any given moment.
You can always control and update your own software, and pay for technical advice when needed instead of metered-cost tushy wiping from a big e-services provider that's going to give you shitty tech support anyway.
Goat sex free since 2001
The huge, big point here is the thing about J2EE vs .NET - that's the focus moving forward. Where we really don't have any other answer but J2EE. dotGNU/Mono/whatever are going to come so damn late it won't matter.
Clusterable, component-based architecture is where it's heading, and PHP/modPERL/whatever ain't doing it NOW. The corp world has gone n-tier architecture, and other than using Apache to front-end WebLogic/WebSphere/whatever, most open source stuff is far behind.
Don't even WASTE your time whining about where they got their numbers on Apache - figure out what to do to address the big picture of web services. What do we got? Not much, JBoss is it as far as I know of for non-vaporware offerings. Tomcat is cool, but it only does servlets and JSP - Tomcat is NOT a bean container. Beans (way stupid, misleading name) are the componentized pieces of code that are needed to beat .NET.
He nailed it on the head - The same way we've been harping about the world changing and rendering Microsoft irrelevant, the way the Open Source world does things is pretty much irrelevant and obsolete as well.
His point about finishing the Open Source versions of j2EE (like way quickly now too) is pretty much the only way we are not going to fall behind. We don't have the time to architect some beautiful dream, we need to shit or get off the pot NOW, it's starting to stink in here!
Which web server you choose is an operating platform decision rather than application decision.
Nobody just wakes up one morning and says "wow, I'm going to switch from Apache to IIS". Rather, if a switch is made it's a much broader move from an MS platform to a UNIX platform, or vice-versa.
Anyone who's worked in an IT facility knows that changing platforms (or even allowing non-homogenous platforms in the first place) is a huge decision, and rightfully so.
So when people talk about relative market shares of IIS vs Apache, know that they are really talking about Microsoft vs Linux (or maybe MS vs UNIX, but you get the idea).
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
Coming from a dot-bomb that preached web services as the solution to every problem and the wave of the future, I see nothing to worry about in this article. The concept of web services as proposed by .NET doesn't boost anything other than Microsoft's bottom line as far as I can tell.
What all the pundits who praise the concepts behind a technology seem to keep missing is that just because you can do something doesn't mean people are willing to pay for it. Look at WAP, sure I've done work with it, but I wouldn't buy a phone with it now and I certainly wouldn't pay a premium for services that can be delivered better and cheaper through an alternate medium. The internet is just another communications pipeline - the stock market and the dot-com shakeups have proved the fact that it is not ipso facto a revenue stream. Have 900 numbers and pay-per-view revolutionized our telephone and cable systems?
When someone shows me a real use for .NET, maybe I'll take a look again but for now Apache fits the bill pretty damn well as far as our business model and budget are concerned. If we need web services with our clients, PTP holds far more promise for keeping our data where we want it - out of Microsoft's hands.
The way I've seen it in real life, it's not the EJB technology that sucks, it's these bullshit can-barely-code psuedo-architects who design these ridiculous mega-projects without understanding the proper way to do n-tier development. They load the app up with a whole bunch of RMI-enabled beans (that'll never be called by anything other than things running on the local machine) and then shit when it uses up a whole gig of RAM and crashes every ten minutes. EJB requires intelligent, up-front planning. You can't code by the seat of your pants in this arena.
"...Apache hasn't introduced any significant user features in two years. (For example, has Apache even managed to deliver a standard GUI configuration tool in all this time?)"
And, why is a GUI necessary for configuration of a web server. It's already (finally) becoming clear that server administrators need to know how to do more than just aim their mouse and click. Insufficient security training is being acknowledged as a business liability.
Sure web services are useful and may very well become the business model of tomorrow, but define it. Your company's soon-to-be-released new revolutionary product line won't be authored in WordXP or ExcelXP documents on some other company's server. If that's a "Web Service" the author is thinking of, it's not and won't become a business model anyone will buy. Interactive applications is probably one of the more viable prospects, and Apache does not offer such interactivity natively. Apache hasn't really advanced much in a couple years, but does that mean it's dead? You can plug a helluva lot more into Apache to make it an interactive, secure, and functional application server for the web than anything IIS will ever produce.
And, you don't need to reboot your whole flipping server when Apache, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or mod_mp3, or whatever else you've rolled into that application server submits a security patch. Just apply the patch and kick start the service. Ouch! That was painful....
Apache is far from dead or dying. It probably won't come with a GUI configurator/wizard thingy. Should it?
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
To implement a simple web service, one doesn't even need a "web server" at all! Just instantiate the xml-rpc server in Python or Perl, or instantiate a SOAP server in Java. And apache can certainly hook into any of these things just as well as IIS can. As for the other things... well, UNIX types have been living without Microsoft's hold-your-hands-and-stick-handcuffs-on-them pre-rolled 'architectures' & components & and everything else.
As the article says, Reduced to the technological basics, it's just XML over HTTP. Are we seriously saying that Apache has some sort of problem serving XML over HTTP? I think the author has bought into the "Web Services!" hype and seriously over-estimates the problems in creating them. Web services are not cool because of technology. They're cool because we're finally finding formats that we can all practically agree on for remote procedure calls.... shorn of the hype, web services are purely social innovations. Microsoft had to hook tech to it to attract the attention of people who are driven by flash, but the tech is almost incidental.
If we were wiser 5 years ago, there's no technological impediment to creating web services then... but there's no known way to shortcut the aquisition of wisdom.
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