Netcraft Interviews Brian Behlendorf

thejackol writes "The co-founder of the Apache Web Server Project and the First Chief Engineer at Wired Magazine was interviewed by Netcraft's Rich Miller about Netcraft's growth, the SCO case's unexpected benefits and changing the world through software. Excerpt: 'It's a good rebuke to the cynical but widespread notion that all it takes is a big pot of gold to litigate your competition out of existance or otherwise win a legal challenge. Good did prevail in the end. Hopefully it won't make us too cocky, because the next challenge could be much harder to fight.'"

Comments

Apache shows what is right with OSS

[ObviousGuy]

Easy to install on any platform. Easy to administrate. Easy to use. Straightforward interface. And best of all, it is well supported.

The GNU/Linux project could learn a lot from these guys.

Re:Apache shows what is right with OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Wanna cyber? I've got my robe and wizard hat.

Re:Apache shows what is right with OSS

[lukewarmfusion]

But it doesn't run .NET!

That was a joke, at least for me. But many clients don't see it as a joke, they see it as a serious obstacle to using OSS. Fortune 500 companies with Microsoft networks, servers, procedures - they're unlikely to adopt an "unsupported" product like Apache. I say unsupported because Microsoft doesn't support it, and they already have support contracts for MS products. They don't have their toes in the water, they're bathing in it.

You can't use many of your ASP apps on Apache (even if you have Chilisoft!). We have clients that turned to us because we can do ASP/SQL Server, and the competition couldn't. The other quote was cheaper, too.

Re:Apache shows what is right with OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

The GNU/Linux project could learn a lot from these guys.

There is no such thing as "the GNU/Linux project".

Re:Apache shows what is right with OSS

[opello]

you've heard of the mono project? (consequently 2 posts prior to this one)

Re:Apache shows what is right with OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

We have clients that turned to us because we can do ASP/SQL Server, and the competition couldn't. The other quote was cheaper, too.

Then, given that businesses are in business to make money and that businesses that run more efficiently than others survive better, this problem will take care of itself. Think of it as evolution as it applies to business.

Re:Apache shows what is right with OSS

[AnuradhaRatnaweera]

The GNU/Linux project could learn a lot from these guys.

Never heard of the `GNU/Linux project'. Am I missing something?

Re:Apache shows what is right with OSS

[RainbearNJ]

And--even better:

It has decent documentation.

The program can be as robust and straightforward as the programmers want it to--but if it has crappy documentation, you're fsck'd. Apache has decent documentation online and a great FAQ. It wouldn't be where it is today if it didn't, IMHO.

Good Guys

[tobechar]

Chalk one more mark for the good guys! :)

Hard work for the good of others does pay off from time to time.

Hillarity..

[JayPee]

I find it hillarious that Brian, one of the people behind Apache is also behind the very raveriffic Hyperreal

Now if he'd only bring back V-rave..

Re:Hillarity..

[Briareos]

Don't forget that Hyperreal's also hosting a lot of other music related lists, IDM and ambient for instance...

np: Vladislav Delay - Kohmeessa (Demo(n) Tracks)

Re:Hillarity..

[djdavetrouble]

Whats hilarious? That Brian actually had a life outside of writing awesome software? I knew him when he was a UCB undergrad... he also started the sf-raves email list back in the early 90's, and was part of the early rave scene in the Bay Area.. He used to host pre-rave parties too at his dorm room. He was always very social, talkative, and good with people. He didn't just sit down in the web crunching away on the workstations ... There were lots of other coders in the scene too, such as the guys from Twitch records. mw worked at Sybase, etc etc....

Re:Hillarity..

[djdavetrouble]

Really, so did I. Maybe you remember me, I worked in the warehouse building duping tapes at that time. I was the really tall guy with the ghetto blaster that played music all day while running 6 different duping machines, name of Dave.
Left summer of '93 to move to NYC.

My personal fave of the time was the outdoor dancing at mission rock, with they guy doing video toaster on his amiga, and those huge ass speakers!

Re:Hillarity..

[bloosqr]

talk about memories!

telnet sfraves.stanford.edu 7283 :)

How many kids from back in the day are still into the music scene I wonder.. A friend of mine actually runs a mailorder store and i now have a horrible addiction to cheesy synthpop but i'm not sure its the same :)

-bloo (avi)

not over

[trybywrench]

Good did prevail in the end.
I wasn't aware the SCO case was over.

Re:not over

[0BoDy]

Oh, it's over. don't believe me read Groklaw Daily. SCO has told the courts too many contradictory things to prove any of them. They'll lose to IBM first, then Novell, then Redhat, then autozone, then Chrystler. If they sue anybody else they'll really be fscked. They probably won't exist as a company after Novell. (though technically you're right, the cases haven't been settled, dropped, or judged yet)

Re:not over

[Chicane-UK]

Whilst we are on the subject of this, I just wanted to ask a quick question to anyone who has been following this case religiously..

Is it likely that once IBM have finished annhilating SCO, are they then going to start a fresh lawsuit against them for damages?

As Groklaw pointed out, SCO made some outrageous claims against IBM.. and although this seems to have had completely the oppostite effect to the IBM & the Linux movement as whole that SCO imagined, are IBM likely to still sue and just firmly bury SCO once and for all? Surely they'd have a good case?

Does SCO really feel it could make all those claims, realise it made an enormous mistake (like we all knew it did the day these lawsuits came to light) and then just back away without anyone noticing?

Re:not over

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM are already countersuing SCO. Here courtesy of the almighty Groklaw is the latest version of their counterclaims. Even if SCO were to fold or to cease their suing of IBM, the counterclaims would still proceed.

import net.groklaw.IANAL;

Correction

[frangipani]

The co-founder of the Apache Web Server Project and the First Chief Engineer at Wired Magazine was interviewed by Netcraft's Rich Miller about Netcraft's growth

I think that should be Apache Web Server's growth, not Netcraft's. Netcraft is mentioned once in the interview.

Re:Correction

[St. Arbirix]

So Brian, we here at Netcraft have been polling around the internet for some time now and since the web server your organization produces has become a major player in our statistics we'd like to know what you think about how our company has grown...

A good rebuke?

[mccalli]

It's a good rebuke to the cynical but widespread notion that all it takes is a big pot of gold to litigate your competition out of existance

SCO are attacking IBM. Pots of gold don't come a great deal bigger than the ones IBM have at their disposal.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:A good rebuke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm ... large pots of gold might not help to sue other rich corporations out of existence, but a large pot of gold, the many lawyers and very large (valid or otherwise) patent portfolio it will buy, will probably service to crush your average poor, lawyerless, open-source programmer. No contest.

Re:A good rebuke?

[im a fucking coward]

will probably service to crush your average poor, lawyerless, open-source programmer. No contest.

Which open-source program got squashed by the evil patent weilding satanic cult? I must've slept in that day.

Litigate your competition out of existance?

[Phidoux]

Why can't one software product "beat" it's competition simply by being better? Why the need to litigate? Be No. 1 because your product is the best, not because you need the law to make it No. 1.

Re:Litigate your competition out of existance?

[millahtime]

Why can't one software product "beat" it's competition simply by being better? Why the need to litigate? Be No. 1 because your product is the best, not because you need the law to make it No. 1.

This is a dog eat dog world. Look at the NO 1's and look at the best product and they are not the same. To get to the top lawsuits, strong arming and many more things are used. That's just life.

Re:Litigate your competition out of existance?

[0BoDy]

According to this theory, Microsoft would make the best software in the world, and McDonalds would make the Best food. Sometimes the better product wins. Sometimes the better marketing wins, some people are given market share and leverage it to their own advantage, others have to build a far-surpassing product in a new market. Reminds me of the way I see minorities excelling in business. They have to do the same job twice as well, for the same pay. It's not right, and it's not fair, but it ceartainly makes for overall better products and economy if the improvements required to get ahead drive the whole market.

Re:Litigate your competition out of existance?

[rmolehusband]

Why can't one software product "beat" it's competition simply by being better?

Sadly, there are few markets where being 'best' automagically makes you number one. Factors such as installed base, brand perception and pure and simple FUD can always swing things for a far poorer product.

Re:Litigate your competition out of existance?

[Brian Blessed]

Look at the NO 1's and look at the best product and they are not the same. To get to the top lawsuits, strong arming and many more things are used.

Except in the case of web servers :-)

Re:Litigate your competition out of existance?

[KrispyKringle]

Depends on what you mean by best. I don't see it as a given that McDonalds' is not the best food, or that Windows is not the best OS. Capitalist markets are a little like evolution. Humans may very well be the epitome of evolution--or so we like to think--but cockroaches will probably be around a hell of a lot longer. So it is with markets; any number of OSes may be technically superior to Windows, but you have to admit, it does just what needs to be done to be successful (anti-competitive practices aside).

For example, I may argue that Microsoft has a terrible security record and therefore must clearly have their heads up their collective asses (so I have argued before). But one would be justified in pointing out that most consumers don't really consider security as much as they consider new features, so Microsoft made a wise choice in deciding to implement OneNote or voice chat in MSN Messenger when they could have been conducting code reviews. I might argue that Apache is far better than IIS (and I don't see much of a counter argument), but those who use IIS will say that without a decent graphical configurator, they just find Apache too difficult to use. Same goes for VB; I sure as hell wouldn't use it for what I do, but for basic desktop application stuff, there's no real problem with it.

What'd I say? Just like cockroaches.

Re:Litigate your competition out of existance?

[Ruprecht the Monkeyb]

There is rarely a single definition of 'best'. If you value ready availability and price over selection and atmosphere, maybe McDonalds does make the 'best' food. If you favor ease of installation and interoperability (with other people, not software) over security and initial cost, maybe, for you, Microsoft does make the 'best' software.

Re:Litigate your competition out of existance?

[Artifakt]

Your point on markets isn't invalidated by it, but the whole point of Natural Selection is that humans aren't an epitome of evolution, and there just isn't really any pinnacle or focal point to evolution. Those cockroaches we share our buildings with have been evolving precisely as long as we have. They have survived various evolutionary selection mechanisms just as well as we have. Nature isn't seeking to produce intelligence, or any other feature we might find can let us divide organisms into 'higher' and 'lower'. Everything we are evolving along side of is equally fit.
The problem I have with your using an evolutionary metaphor is that applying it to capitalism is just what leads to social Darwinism. Microsoft probably firmly believes it, to the extent they belive that being selected by the forces of the market is the same as being at the predestined peak of the natural order.
It isn't. If ignoring security is really that potent a failing to nature, then nature will select against Microsoft. If millions of people were wrong about the relative importance of security, then nature will select against them too. Public opinion is not a court of no appeal - Natural Selection is.

Re:Litigate your competition out of existance?

[samantha]

It is not "just life". It exists because we agree to live and work that way. It is a common mistake/excuse to assume that things that are in reality the results of human decisions and acceptance are immutable facts of nature. They are not.

Re:Litigate your competition out of existance?

[KrispyKringle]

No, I think the point really does hold true. For one thing, is it even a given that Microsoft is at the epitome of the market? Certainly they are the wealthiest in town, but I'd wager that Google has higher profit margins (I don't really feel like looking this up). Apple has a customer loyalty that Microsoft does not. Point is, there are at least a couple different ways to measure success; income may not be the only one, any more than proliferation are a good measure of evolutionary success.

But as for social Darwinism, in a sense that is the goal of corporations. I for a long time have found most, if not all talk about corporate morality or being ``good corporate citizens'' to be completely full of shit. Good corporations do it to avoid corporate criminal liability; bad corporations do it because they really care. Perhaps I sound like I have that backwards, but the goal of a corporation is not to make a good product, not to help the community, and not, really, even to be loyal to its employees (at the expense of profit, at least). A corporation should profit. If I were a shareholder in a corporation that didn't offshore when others were, I wouldn't be proud that it was a good corporate citizen; I'd be angry that it didn't do whats most profitable.

But I think we're fundamentally in agreement. If users decide security matters, Microsoft will lose their gamble. But I don't think Microsoft is stupid or incompetent--and I think they may even be right about the market.

Re:Litigate your competition out of existance?

[cbreaker]

See: OS/2. And countless hundreds of other software packages.

OS/2 was far superior to the current offerings by Microsoft, and was never able to gain enough market share.

Behlendorf on SCO: Legal Cannibalism?

[handy_vandal]

From the interview:

Q. What's your take on the long-term impact of the SCO lawsuits? What changes - positive and negative - do you see it producing for Linux and the open source community?

A. I'm assuming that thanks to the BayStar callback that this lawsuit is nearly dead. Of course SCO, could sue their own financial backers and prolong this further, but it feels like we're seeing the beginning of the end.

Whoa -- now there's a thought -- SCO turning litigious against their former backers. Cannibalism among the cannibals ....

-kgj

The opposite is always a possibility

[ObviousGuy]

Netscape sued itself out of existence when it tried to claim that Navigator was being boxed out by Microsoft. Double whammy for Netscape: Inferior product AND litigious management.

hyperreal

[damian]

Hmmm... they forgot to mention the great work he did on SFRaves and http://www.hyperreal.org/

Maybe a bit too underground for your average CV

Re:hyperreal

[tgrigsby]

Exactly what I thought. It actually took me a minute when I saw the name before I put it together that this was the same guy I used to fire off emails to about various parts of the hyperreal site. A darned informative site, too... Somehow, I wouldn't have pictured him as a CTO, and I had no idea he was one of the founders of ASF.

What a funny world...

Best?

[0BoDy]

While I love Apache and trust apache as mutch as the next slashbot, I would like to point out that appache was also one of the first webservers. Originally written as a patch to the http deamon for unix/bsd. They cam out riding on the pigtails of an existing market leader. Microsofts IIS hasn't realy ever taken the lead there, nor will they, untill they shore up the product and secure it better. They'll also have to find a licensing scheme that can compete with Apache's open source license. Better product yes. Is that the reason for market dominance? yes, but only becuase it always has been.

Re:Best?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what happens when your first to the market.

If IIS was their first then it would probably be a different picture.

But then again the internet thing was Microsoft's first big screwup. They didn't take it serious and thus Unix was able to easy maintain it's dominance.

Now that they are trying, it's to late and most people are too smart now to drink the IIS koolaid.

But then again we have dotNet. But that's what Mono is for.

Then people will have no excuse against continueing to using Apache. Good stuff.

Re:Best?

[Roadkills-R-Us]

First to market means nothing with MS around. They've eaten plenty of other apps.

While Apache was originally "a patchy" version of NCSA's httpd, they still did things right, or they wouldn't have taken off in the environment at the time; NCSA or another offshoot would have stayed dominant. The Apache folks did the right things, and not *just* with the software (although they certainly did a fine job there!)

Even with IIS's problems, until recently, IIS were was gaining market share and threatening to take the lead. Apache's dominance was in doubt. The growing acceptance of Open Source has been critical in Apache taking off again, as well as the security issues with IIS.

Finally, you said: ``Better product yes. Is that the reason for market dominance? yes, but only becuase it always has been.''

Better product means *nothing* in the marketplace. Sales and marketing, cubic dollars, FUD, perceived safety, and a variety of other factors make the difference. (Speaking as both a geek and a consumer, that sucks, but it's reality.) Otherwise, the original DOS-based PC would have never made it; there were much better alternatives to both DOS and the hardware platform. But IBM understood all the issues above (and more), and things took off. MS rode IBM's coat tails in that case; Bill Gates (or someone at MS) understood marketing and business, and a clearly inferior product won the day.

No its not over!

[SerpentMage]

As much as I would like to say it is over, its not over until its over.

Lets go back to the Microsoft Antri-trust trials. MS has been deemed a monopolist and what happened? Nada, zip, zilch, zero, the big doughnut! So even if SCO looses maybe they will win on some other things.

Who knows what the judge will do and say. Logic does not play any role here...

vrave

[ebh]

And the Weber-weenies with it? :)

Actually, they do talk occasionally about bringing vrave back up, but I hope they don't--my productivity went way down every afternoon while it was still active.

True story: My (now) wife and I set our wedding date on vrave.

Best quote I've seen in a while!

[Roadkills-R-Us]

``I suspect the claims that the GPL "violates the U.S. Constitution" will get recorded in some historical analysis of corporate Tourette's syndrome.''

So *that's* Darl's problem...

alright, I have *finally* done it ...

[Vryl]

That is, complained about the moderation. This will be my last post to /.

YOU FUCKING IDIOTS ... what twit could ever mark this tripe up as 'insightful' ... fuck me gently with a chainsaw.

Re:alright, I have *finally* done it ...

[lukewarmfusion]

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not flamebait.

My comment was simply pointing out that companies with a solid investment in Microsoft products are unlikely to stray from that path. Especially on a risky venture like any of the thousands of open-source projects that DON'T make it big. You could invest your company's resources in Microsoft (who's been around, offers support, and isn't likely to disappear in the next few years) or you could spend less but possibly end up with a product that has no support, no updates, doesn't work with the rest of your systems, and was built by a company that no longer exists.

Hmmm... most big businesses are conservative when it comes to their (and the investors') money.

no! faulty legal system.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not "just life", that's the result of a faulty legal system in the US. It still pays more for MS to continue strong arming and breaking laws, when all they have to do is pay a fine. Another example is the MPAA and RIAA 'sponsoring' the feds to hunt down movie and music downloaders/traders instead of going after more important things like murders and terrorists. i'm moving over seas.

they merged with an outsourcer

[Anonymous Coward]

the moderator thinks that outsourcing is off topic but the article talks about outsourcing

While looking at this we met with a company named Enlite Technologies, who had a collaborative project management tool for the electronics-design market, and who had the majority of their engineers in Chennai, India. We were considering outsourcing some work to them, but I really liked the founder (Gopinath Ganapathy) and the team he'd formed, and I wanted something much closer and more, er, collaborative - so we decided to merge.

merging with an outsourcer looks like outsourcing to me.

IBM isn't going away

[dananderson]

SCO has a big pot of gold, from Microsoft, to sue IBM and others. However, it takes MORE than gold to win, you have a good case. OTOH, you can sue the other party until they go broke or give up. That's not going to happen with IBM. So, lets revise this to:

All it takes is a big pot of gold to litigate your competition out of existence, but don't try it if your competition has a bigger pot of gold.

Why Netcraft results are somewhat skewed?

[tlambert]

Why Netcraft results are somewhat skewed?

"Domain parking".

I have three domains registered and parked with Tucows International. They all look like they are Linux boxes running Apache.

I'm not saying that I wouldn't deploy that combination, if the domains were live instead of parked, but it's pretty clear that the Netcraft numbers have some skew to them.

To be clear about this, there's a similar skew towards IIS on some parking hosts.

Maybe Netcraft could block inclusion of domain parking hosts?