Despite falling share prices, open source companies are continuing
to innovate
Last week's feature painted rather a gloomy picture of the free
software world, and might have suggested that open source was just
a fad. But the setbacks listed are really no more than a reflection
of the general dotcom malaise.
In fact, the open source world is alive and well, as evidenced by
numerous new and thriving projects. Many of these come from
relatively unknown players, but even Red Hat, one of the best
established open source firms, has been branching out into new
fields.
For example, last year it launched its high-performance Web server,
Tux. More recently, it has created an open source
e-commerce
suite. Like Tux, the suite is freely available for download
- Red Hat aims to make its money selling support and
consultancy.
One important part of the e-commerce suite is the Red Hat
database.
This is also open source, being based on the well-known free
software
PostgreSQL. Nor
is Red Hat the only company hoping to provide some competition for
Oracle in the same way that GNU/Linux has challenged Microsoft
Windows.
Another is
Great
Bridge, which has the backing of Red Hat's original
investor, as well as a sizeable chunk of the
PostgreSQL development team. Better-established in the
database world is
MySQL.
This entered the open source mainstream in June 2000, when it
adopted the
GNU general
public license.
One popular use of databases in the online context is to populate
Web templates. Microsoft's Active Server Pages led the way here,
but the open source technology
PHP, which was originally
an acronym for Personal Home Page, but now stands for
PHP: Hypertext
Preprocessor, is increasingly popular. Support is available
from the company
Zend.
One open source package that uses PHP (along with Apache and MySQL)
is the
Midgard
content management system. Also open source, but with full
commercial backing, is
Zope. This draws heavily
on the open source programming language
Python, and the company
recently took on Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, as director of
its PythonLabs, along with most of the Python development
team.
Another company supporting Python is
ActiveState. This
began by writing versions of Perl for Windows, and now has an
impressive range of
products
built around open source software.
But all of this activity by new companies is dwarfed by the
increasing commitment of IBM. Although its
GNU/Linux home page looks
modest enough, the figures that IBM chief Lou Gerstner was throwing
around at the end of last year (
www.ibm.com/lvg/1212.phtml)
are not. He spoke of investing $1bn in GNU/Linux this year, and
having 1,500 IBM developers dedicated to the area.
Further proof of not just IBM's activity, but the progress of
GNU/Linux in recent years is provided by the announcement of the
Distributed
Terascale Facility. This computing grid consists of four
interconnected GNU/Linux clusters that will be capable of
performing 11.6 trillion calculations a second.
What is truly breathtaking about this facility is not so much the
fact that it was possible to use open source software to create
such phenomenal computing power: rather it is that IBM was prepared
to bet its reputation not on something it had created and tested
rigorously itself, but on a motley collection of software put
together by a bunch of hackers around the world during the past 15
years.
Next week: Grid computing