Slashdot Mirror
Sun Open Sources the Netscape Enterprise Server
An anonymous reader writes "Brian Aker has announced that Sun has open sourced the Netscape Enterprise Server under the BSD license. This is the evolution of the original server Netscape sold in the '90s during the rise of the first bubble. Almost twenty years later, Apache's original competitor is now made available for anyone to use under an open source license."
Is this even relevant anymore? Does anyone even care?
Can someone explain why this story was tagged 'republicans'?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Wait, why is the "republicans" tag on every news item?
Wow. Netscape Enterprise Server. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I was actually pretty excited about looking at the code to satisfy my historical interest. There's a lot of old Netscape technology that's bitten the dust over the years!
Unfortunately, this appears to be the modern Java Enterprise Server code. There's even Java 1.5 classes to read in modern XML configuration files. I can't find any sign of some of the really interesting stuff from days gone by. (e.g. LiveScript - a technology that was before its time and thus under-implemented compared to what it could have been used for.)
Still, this is a very interesting bit of history and I'd like to thank Sun and Mr. Aker for releasing it! I'm going to dig through the versioning history and see if there's anything in there. Anyone else here find something interesting?
One thing that impresses upon me about this server is how little code their is. Weighing in at only 13 MBs, it's far too small of a project to be of commercial interest today. But back then, this was some pretty big stuff! ;-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Can something like this: http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/craftnet/
be used to find sites still running on this ancient software? Perhaps people will find an exploitable part of the code and take down an ancient web site!
Same with open sourcing Java, the boat has long left the pier. What sun should concentrate on is making a combined multimedia stack, from the desktop to the server to deliver games and video to the next generation of Internet users. Do a deal with the content owners, the telecom companies and the combined whole could be a massive revenue earner. are you listening, Scott McNealy
davecb5620@gmail.com
New courses in fall: Computer History
open sourcing the product also implies that the patents are void / not enforcable (sic)
Whoa - I dunno about that. Patents and trade-secrets are kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum - you can protect something by hiding it (trade secret) or patenting it, which means fully disclosing it.
Is there specific precedence for OSS-ing something "implicitly" voiding patents?
I'm certain that someone will come along and make it worth considering. It's happened with every other newly-open-sourced-commercial-product that I can think of.
... whenever I stumble across an old screenshot of Netscape Navigator and next to the URL it says "Netsite" instead of "Location" indicating that the page was being served by a Netscape server.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Shouldn't this announcement be placed under "too little, too late"?
If you license something under the GPL, you have to provide a license to your patents too. It doesn't void the patent, though.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
After some years it was renamed the SunONE Web Server and most recently renamed again to the JES Web Server (Sun just like to keep you confused, thus the constant renaming of the product!)
First of all they're not going to open source the entire product but only the webserver core. That is not too surprising considering how Solaris has slowly started to adopt web services for options way beyond your common webserver. I can see that not everyone grasps these tidbits since Sun is indeed a little vague with certain information.
But I think its silly that you assume that SunONE got renamed. SunONE eventually came to an halt and got re-written (the core was basically all which remained) and a new Administrative webinterface was added. The product then became the Sun Java Webserver 7. So SunONE got basically "renamed" (rehauled is a better word IMO) to SJWS. And as to JES; the Sun Java Enterprise System.. That is merely a whole suite consisting of several components. You have your basic webserver, LDAP server, mail server, application server, portal server, and so on.
And guess what ? Instead of re-inventing the wheel all Sun did was basically putting their webserver product into this Java suite. Even SunONE was part of the previous JES suite. So I think that Aker's blog is simply silly and this particular post really isn't worth the attention IMO.
Granted; Sun has done some pretty silly things and their website can indeed be very confusing at times. Just look at the link I added; does this give you the impression that you, as an individualist or a private business, can download and utilize JES free of charge? Those things have always been very confusing with Sun. But their examples and explanation of what a product really is or what it consists of has never been vague. So I think its a little cheap to write something up which you obviously haven't looked into for one second, only to blame Sun because their information would be vague. Thats rubbish IMO.
One of the best is still Roxen or it's completely free web server version, Caudium. Never ceases to amaze me how little play the product gets when it is so horrifically powerful and has very good performance.
What about BSD, which is the applicable license in this case?
That makes me moist too
Well, that would be pretty screwed up if our patent system allowed someone to give something to someone under a license that specifically allows them to sell or transfer or otherwise relicense something without giving them a license to the patents required to do so as well. Wait, is this 2009 and am I still in the US? My bad then. Seriously, that is a good question, and I'd hope that I'm right.
Where all the failed projects go to die.
Perhaps open source projects should be split into two categories (inspired by MIB II):
Old and busted:
Netscape Enterprise Server
New Hotness:
Apache
...install Apache, and you're done. Time for wings and beer over happy hour.
A company I worked for used NES. I think developer licenses ran about $10k each. Add the annual support and maintenance, and that was some real cash.
So we switched to something cheaper. Looks like we weren't the only ones!
Apparently, "open source" is the new word for "end of life."
so he has to use the "old" "grand" once-upon-a-time name to re-brand itself.......
coz new thing doesn't give a dime in sales
netscape was the hero.....
sun juz use the dead body
lame
CATUION: I AM NOT A LAWYER.
I think the doctrine of latches would apply here. By making the code available under a FOSS license, Sun is implicitly giving authorization to use and distribute it under the terms of that license. It's not as clean as the GPL3, but I think that there's a history of case law that says it works as I've stated. (But, of course, the fact that there's a history of case law implies that many times there have been attempts to not comply with the implied promise.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This is the core of the Sun's current Webserver 7. The submitter linked to a blog that described it as Netscape Enterprise Server (it's great-great-grandfather) rather than the blog that clearly points out Sun open sourcing the core of their current Webserver is misleading.
festering hunk of bad code? Yippee.
Honestly, Netscape Enterprise Server (in all its incarnations) was one of the worst servers I've ever had to misfortune to develop on and support.
The configuration system was TERRIBLE. The gui was worthless for all but the simplest setups, and if you hand edited ANYTHING (which you were virtually assured to have to do) then using the GUI would cause the whole configuration to become hopelessly corrupt. Worse the server didn't actually do things like CHECK its configuration, it would just operate in a completely erratic fashion.
As if THAT wasn't bad enough the thing NEVER became 100% stable. It was absolutely required to cluster at least 2-3 of these turkeys together to be sure that at least one would make it through any given 24 hour period in decent shape. We had 3 rebooting themselves every day on 8 hour offsets from each other. At least you could HOPE that 2 of them were actually functional at any given moment.
LiveScript was equally a boondoggle. Compared to what else was available at the time (early ASP, CGI scripts) it wasn't TOO bad, but javascript really was NOT up to building any kind of serious app. Just isn't possible to build a really large complex code base using it. I know, I tried...
Finally, the database integration was painful. Informix support kinda sorta worked. Oracle was maybe about 90% of the way there. There was no support for anything else, MAYBE Sybase. But you couldn't call a stored proc or anything beyond basic queries.
Later versions fixed some of the problems, but by the time it got even tolerably usable Apache was already light years ahead.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I'm not exactly a fan of the server, but I work in the financial industry and we work with a vendor which provides banking services built on this platform. (Name and version vary.) Whether they will continue to use it or not remains to be seen, but with it open sourced, they have the option to continue to use it and support it to whatever degree they desire where they might otherwise have felt like they were limited to whatever level of support they could get agreed to by Sun. This may make the difference for them between a solid and supportable product and costly development and associated growing pains on a new platform.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I had to administer this vile and festering piece of shit a few years ago. We had an installation put together by contractors, who'd just used Sun everything - an in-house application server written in Java, running on E250s and Netra T1s running Solaris 7 ... and using Netscape Server 4.0 for the web server.
Then we had to upgrade the four web servers to Solaris 9 - which mostly worked flawlessly, except one machine was completely trashed and needed rebuilding from scratch - and Netscape Server 4.0 to Sun ONE 6.1. There were serious vulnerabilities in 4.0, and 6.1 wouldn't run on Solaris 7.
This process involved two upgrades. You can't go from 4.0 to 6.1 - you have to either do 4.0->4.1->6.1 or 4.0->6.0->6.1. The second was a nightmare, the first was worse (and the SSL cert got trashed somehow, which required dealing on the phone with Verisign. Fuuuuuck).
I wish the open-sores version of Netscape Enterprise Server all the success of the open-sourced AOL Web Server. I have a deep reservoir of fear, loathing and hatred for Apache, but it's heavenly compared to the festering and vile Netscape piece of shit.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
If I remember correctly, you can use JavaScript on the server with NES.. That's becoming popular again (e.g. Aptana Jaxer)