InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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December 18/25, 2000 |
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Is There An Open-Source Solution?
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Not all open-source products are as obscure as Mico and Squid. FreeBSD, an open-source operating system that some say is technically superior and more mature than Linux, has been around since the early 1990s, but it has failed to garner the same attention. This relative anonymity continues even though it powers a vast number of sites; it's used in various capacities by heavyweights such as Hotmail, IBM, Inktomi, and Yahoo.
Part of FreeBSD's attractiveness to developers is that it's largely based on the 4.4 BSD Unix distribution, a proven code base that scales favorably and has been well-documented and utilized in academic and research environments. FreeBSD is finally starting to get the marketing attention it deserves, though, through the efforts of Berkeley Software Design, a company that sells and supports its own BSD Unix distribution. Berkeley Software Design is now also selling and supporting FreeBSD, and its boxed version of FreeBSD for desktops became available in October in mainstream stores such as Best Buy and CompUSA.
Open-source BSD Unix ports also come in two other major variants, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Compared with FreeBSD, which runs only on two platforms (Intel and Alpha), both NetBSD and OpenBSD run on many platforms, from handheld devices up to multiprocessor systems. OpenBSD, in particular, has a reputation for mature security features, because of the extensive code auditing and testing that has been performed on it. OpenBSD is used in a number of commercial security products that include embedded systems and firewalls.
The crowded field of commercial application servers is fertile ground for open source. An application server provides interactivity and dynamic content for Web sites, usually positioned as middleware between the Web site and a database server. Just about any Web site, E-commerce or otherwise, that offers users any level of interactivity uses an application server.
PHP (the acronym originally stood for Personal Home Page) is a popular application server that predates such well-known commercial application server technologies as Microsoft's Active Server Pages and Allaire Corp.'s ColdFusion, though it's rarely mentioned and has no formal marketing support. Strictly speaking, PHP is a programming language used to build applications that serve up dynamic Web pages. Its syntax is similar to the C programming language but also includes aspects of Java and Perl as well.
PHP's popularity is widespread, having recently achieved first place in E-Soft's survey of the most popular add-ons to the Apache Web server with use on 33% of the Apache sites surveyed. PHP isn't just for Apache, however.
The latest PHP, version 4, works with many different Web servers and on platforms as diverse as Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Solaris, and HP/UX. With a slew of books available and a large installed base of sites, including parts of Amazon.com and Lycos.com, it's hard to understand why PHP doesn't have more media visibility. Its recent backing by Zend Technologies Ltd., an Israeli software company, may improve this situation, however.
Other open-source application servers worth looking at include Zope (which stands for Z Object Publishing Environment), Tomcat, and Enhydra. Zope is a sophisticated application server written in Python, which itself is an open-source scripting language. Tomcat is an implementation of Sun Microsystems' JavaServer Pages and Java Servlet specifications. Enhydra is a modern application server that compiles HTML and XML files into Java classes.
The list of open-source databases is short, reflecting on both the complexity of database servers and the fact that this is one open-source niche that has yet to garner widespread business support. Interestingly, even though open-source databases have a miniscule share of the database server market, they command a substantial market share of the embedded database market where open-source products such as Berkeley DB are used extensively within server applications and information appliances.
As general-purpose database servers go, the only two real contenders for open-source SQL databases are PostgreSQL and MySQL, and only MySQL appears to have a substantial developer audience. However, it's still typically utilized for smaller, noncritical object stores, directory information, and application data, not general-purpose user data storage and retrieval. However, with per-seat prices for popular commercial databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server in the hundreds of dollars, it's only a matter of time before open-source databases catch up, at least in terms of features.
Companies such as NuSphere Corp., which is adding row-level locking (an important feature for operations involving reliable database transactions) to MySQL, and Great Bridge LLC, which is supporting and enhancing PostgreSQL, are betting that these products can mature enough to acquire decent market share for small and midsize businesses.
Still, scalability and reliability aren't negotiable with database servers, and these products have lacked features such as replication and full-text indexing for a long time. It may be years before they can challenge the likes of Sybase, Microsoft SQLServer, and Oracle on the high end. Fortunately, the open-source developer community doesn't have to worry about making profits or going out of business.
Databases are the exception, rather than the rule, when it comes to successful open-source software infrastructure, but for many open-source products, some quality marketing would help them make inroads into IT departments. A marketing budget doesn't prove the viability of a product, but it usually does inform businesses about who's using a product, what its capabilities are, and what kind of support is available.
This is comforting knowledge to potential customers, and it's knowledge that can be hard to obtain for many open-source products. The marketing landscape is changing though, as software vendors and consulting firms start to see the advantages of professional marketing for open source.
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