Category: Kev’s Blog

JBoss have released v2.0 of their Portal framework, implementing the JSR168 Portal specification.

Sun have released their flagship Unix operating system, Solaris, into the open source arena, as Open Solaris

The latest version of Solaris 10, is now available free for download and use.

This clearly is a huge move for Sun, as this is their (up until now) proprietary OS that they have spent years (and probably millions) developing, now available for anyone to use for free. Time will tell how this will affect adoption of Linux, as now Solaris offers an interesting alternative, backed by years of development by Sun. Red Hat recently went in the opposite direction with their release of Red Hat Enterprise, and decided to offer their Linux distribution with additional features as a commercial product for sale, rather than free (they do still however back the open source development of RedHat Fedora Core, their free distribution of RedHat).

Solaris 10 offers some key advantages (I believe) over Linux:

• Native Linux apps can run on Solaris without recompilation, enabling easy migration to the Solaris platform
• Dynamic Tracing – all aspects of the system and software running on the system can be monitored, even on a production live system, aiding performance and problem determination
• Solaris Containers – a feature where individual applications can be compartmentalized into their own isolated spaces, so that one application will not affect another
• Predictive Healing – the system monitors itself to predict failures and gives advance warning if systems and expected to fail

The worst news for Microsoft may not be the many delays and missed deadlines for their Longhorn release of Windows, but may be the fact that with every new release of Windows, corporate customers have been chosing to not upgrade and stay with the previous release for longer before they consider upgrading.

Microsoft are going to launch new Visual Studio 2005 which will include a new set of tools called Visual Studio Express, with the intent to bring tools and technologies to compete directly in the small webserver space and complete with the open source LAMP technology stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP).

Problem is though, Microsoft still don’t get it. I don’t need to or want to buy their tool set which will lock me into a Micorosft IIS server and cost me x hundreds of dollars, running on an unreliable server platform (Windows) which again is going to cost be x hundreds of dollars (in the case of Windows Server), for the privilege of running a server open to numerous security exploitations and which needs to be rebooted every few days just to stay running. I already have a rich, wide choice of interoperable technologies, used and supported heavily by the user community, which I can run on any one of a number of Linux flavors, or even Windows should I so be inclined.

Micorosft have already missed the boat. I don’t believe they are going to catch up in the LAMP arena, they have already lost. Apache is still seeing an increasing number of servers out in the wild, whereas the number of IIS installations is still declining, as it has been the past few years. According to the Netcraft server surveys, Apache installations are now over 70% of the installed servers on the internet, whereas IIS is a dwindling 20%.

The only way Microsoft would be able to catch up would be if they played the same tactic as they did when they launched Internet Explorer against the then dominant browser, Netscape. Although back in the day you could download Netscape, although not many people did over a 14.4/28.8 modem, it was also available for sale in PC stores off the shelf. What did Microsoft do to gain market share? Give away IE for free.