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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.
Should it?
Hell no! I've administered to IIS and Apache servers for years, and all that IIS's GUI ever does is get in the way. Let's imagine for a moment that you have an IIS server hosting multiple sites, and that one of those sites is working properly while the other doesn't work at all. Now tell me how you'd go about comparing the settings on the two to see what's different? It's a god damn pain in the ass. You can't compare the two side by side, and there's a handful of entirely separate panels to check for differences, each with sub-panels.
Now, with apache, I can open two terminals/editors and compare the comparisons side-by-side in just a moment.
With text configs, I can also compose a template for new sites and set them up with a quick cut and paste operation. Much less work than creating a new site in IIS...
-consistent user interface
You should examine OSX from Apple.
-let's get some good fonts
OSX: Some of the most beautiful fonts I have ever seen. The font sizing tool is pretty cool as well.
-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.
Some weird stuff in Aqua, but overall nice. Also Apple listens to their market and are making requested changes and options available in OSX.
-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...
Darwin....
-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.
Whoa dude. I suppose S. Jobs qualifies here, but I am not sure if I want him making all of the decisions. Lets say Apple as a whole. The do have some pretty smart folks there. Especially after the purchase of NeXT.
-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.
OSX.
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...
Very painful...
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I would like to see the netcraft study after all of the unintentional IIS sites are shut down because of CodeRed.
Take EJB for instance. What a bloated overhyped piece of crap. There's so much bullshit from Sun about EJB when the bloody thing just plain doesn't work. Just about every project is better off with just using servlets and standard beans and their own persistence instead of relying on the slow and crappy CMP. EJB is bullshit and so is the dotNet crap and all that web services circus. It seems to me that good coders with PHP and apache knowledge seem to be able to pull a better magic than all the Javas and dotNets of this world. I'd say OpenSource is not missing the bandwagon at all unless you have a bandwagon of hype in mind.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
The authors main argument wasn't the slight drop in Apache market share, it was the real fact that in the future, a simple web server will not be enough. Rather, a web services platform is what is needed. He feels that simply copying Microsofts strategy is no good (Mono, dotGnu)....it is actually making us look stupid: why would the Unix community need to learn from M$ how to make Servers. Traditionally the roles have been somewhat reversed. I agree with the Author that the Open Source community has no choice but to embrace Java. At least that way we will not simply be a M$ copycat.
The trend is that IIS is gaining little and apache is gaining alot wiht small ups and downs while the others fade away at the exepense of apache/IIS.
With the code red worm and all the latest news about security holes in IIS/NT, I believe corporate mindshare has dwindled quite alot. I have a relative who works at FedEX(one of the huge victims of code red), and bussiness was down for close to 2 days. They are a mainly unix vased company trying to adopt to win32 but now they are having second thoughts.
Go look at the chart and you will see that apache usually wiggles up and down while it rises. Also expect the number of apache installs to rise up significantly due to some bussinesses worried about security holes of Microsoft products. However the introduction of WinXP may change this. I assume college students who are not cs-majors will form their own webpages with IIS because its there on their computers for free.
http://saveie6.com/
>Let's get real.
.net becomes real, MS can toast Quicken at will. Then consider what the X-Box portends, beside entry into the lucrative gaming market and a route beyond the static PC business.
.net, bringing the new territory 'into the fold' and making it immune to assault - Microsoft Forever.
.net. Instead, Microsoft learned from the problems of Java, in addition to attacking it, so that .net has emerged stronger in its first existence, however vaprous.
It is real. Unfortunately, take a look at history. With only a few exceptions, every time Microsoft loses a market battle, they come back stronger, only to lose, again. Eventually they come back and win.
Then (and here's the history for you) the competition lays over and dies. Again, with only a few exceptions, (not universal, but darned close) every time Microsoft wins, they win for good.
To be more concrete and less pessimistic about it, we have to hope Open Source and Linux fit into the exception side of that. But in order to do so, one must look at exactly what Microsoft is really doing. Whenever they pick one of these battles, it tends to be 'near' their core competence. Even though they lose several times, they've got the deep pockets to keep at it. When they finally win, it is close enough to their core to quickly become part of the body, instead of an extension. Kind of growing by engulfing markets, like an amoeba.
They are generally smart enough to not attempt something too far from their core. The few times they have ventured too far are when they've been stymied. Quicken and Talisman, to name two. Incidentally, once
It's now becoming apparent that there are at least three fronts on the battle with Linux and Open Source. First is legal, with patents and the like. Next is web services, essentially negating the positive values Unix (and clones) bring to the web of mere reliability by raising the bar on base function. That way Unix no longer 'meets requirements' because it is missing thise 'essential' Win-services, no matter what the reliability. Finally, consolidate those web services with the desktop - the focus of
Perhaps this is the real tragedy of Java, because in many respects it formed the underpinnings of competition to
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.
We need a better response to Microsoft. IMHO part of the process will be "Walling them off in the US." There are several factors in our favor here, one of the foremost being other countries' distrust of the US-based Micro$oft Corporation. Second is the MS revenue model, putting them beyond reach of the third world, where the bulk of the growth is going to occur.
So as a US citizen, I suspect I must advocate not wasting a lot of time on unique requirements of our market. Please fight the battles in South America, in Europe, in Asia, in Australia. They are *much* more important to Linux and Open Source. I suspect in the USA it now pivots around the release of Windows XP as a litmus test. If the courts allow it to happen as-is, Microsoft will feel it a green light to do anything they want, and the genie will be back out of the bottle that has been partially constraining it for a few years, now.
Yes, Virginia, they sky IS falling. There are simply too many defunct companies who failed to heed the warning for us to fail to heed it this time.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Read this: it may not change your life, but it might just change your mind. If it does, mod it up ;)
Zope has Enterprise-level scalability and is the closest OS competitor to the most advanced Java app servers, with much, much more and no Java BS.
However, Zope is more advanced than those, and has now:
Improvments being made continually via current Projects:
Zope is open-source, works well with Apache and Squid, has great RDB abilities. It naturally exposes objects for publishing using a strong, easy to use security model. It supports authentication off of LDAP, NT Domains, RADIUS, etc. It's odb catalog features allow the development of applications that use dynamic queries to organize content (and potentially code) objects. It's the strongest suite of features for web-services oriented middleware out there, because it has a several year lead in many respects on the competition! Python is XP, so it has the same advantages as a CLR, provided it is coupled with an XP GUI component model or class library, like PyXPCOM (Mozilla) or wxWindows (Unix, Win32, Mac). Last, but not least, it is easy to develop for.
An open challenge to all the folks trying to develop their own toolkits from scratch (dotGNU, Mono, etc): DON'T - instead use something that is already proven in this problem domain: Zope and Python!
www.zope.org
www.python.org
Sneer at the article all you want, but he has some excellent and valid points. Having just been through a 7 month design for a customer portal and e-commerce site for my company, I can tell you that this man is right. I actually argued for a Apache + PHP approach to our system. I'm QUITE glad that I lost the argument becuase we'd still be trying to scale that approach.
.NET. I saw the Java Community Process in action at JavaOne and it's actually quite impressive. I went to many seminars where it turned out that Sun's own implementations for Java in the JCS were voted down in favor of externally derived ideas. One of the noted speakers was one of the major developers for Tomcat and the Apache-Jakarta project (Sorry, I forget the name now). Tomcat is a wonderful platform that is an early concept of how the Open Source community can rally around a not-quite-open source product.
I attended JavaOne in June. Granted, it's a 17,000 attendee propaganda show but you'd be amazed at a lot of the software coming out of companies that are doing J2EE. Application platforms like Oracle 9iAS, iPlanet and IONA are amazingly powerful and robust. The J2EE implementation has 5 years of maturity behind it. Microsoft, while honestly having some interesting ideas, is at least 3 years of development effort behind Sun. It's a complete framework that handles everything from massive database connectivity to advanced XML parsing with technology such as XSL, DOM and SAX to guaranteed-delivery messaging systems for distributed applications.
Java is not free software or open source, but it's a lot better than
Open Source would do well to embrace Java as much as possible. Eventually Java will turn into C, where there are many compilers and run-time environments available for all sorts of uses and needs. It's already happening comercially from a lot of companies who have a good idea and are running with it, such as KADA Systems for J2ME. Sun's primary interest in Java is a Microsoft-killer and if they have to relinquish more control to get that they will. Remember that at its core, Sun is a hardware and OS company, not a programming/application company like Microsoft.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
While it's certainly scary that IIS is enabled by default, when one considers the recent (and not so recent) problems it's had, the fact remains that Apache is also enabled, by default, in quite a few Linux distributions. So I don't know if this is a very strong against the survey.
- James