News about the open-source webserver Apache

 Apache Slips, Study Says, Aug 20, 2007

More evidence is emerging that Apache is suffering against Redmond, after a survey revealed that Microsoft's Internet Information Services Web server is outserving Apache on Fortune 1000 websites.

I could say there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, but that would only be half the truth -- pun intended. The methodologies of the two surveys vary significantly, and I can't for the life of me tell which one is more accurate.

At a time when Firefox is steadily adding market share and chipping away at Microsoft's own market dominance in the browser sector, Apache's emerging vulnerability is a very dangerous signal to send.

One of the unsung features of GPLv3 is its grant of compatibility to the Apache and Eclipse open source licenses.

In October this year Apache passed another milestone, with over 50 million sites recorded by the Netcraft survey, up from 40 million in February.

"We've learned from Apache," acknowledged Bill Staples, product unit manager for IIS. Version 7.0 takes the IIS feature set and breaks it down into individual components, or modules, that can be loaded on an as-needed basis. The result is a Web server with much less overhead.

A 'welcoming environment' is being created to spur more women into get involved in Apache projects

The Apache Foundation has proposed creating an open-source version of Java on the desktop, a plan that Sun Microsystems has initially welcomed.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) may soon have some full-time, paid staff, including an executive director, according to a member of the board of directors of the Delaware foundation.

Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web-server project, says he never considered building a commercial company around what has become the single most successful piece of open-source code.

Apache powers 68% of active Web sites, up from 54% two years ago, according to Netcraft, a company that surveys software used on Web sites. Apache has consistently captured market share at the expense of two formidable commercial competitors, Microsoft with its Internet Information Server, and Sun Microsystems with its SunOne Web server.

The Apache Web server sprang out of a group of eight Webmasters communicating with one another about what they wish they had in an HTTP server at a time when the existing offerings fell short. As each Webmaster contributed thinking and code to the project, "there was a lot of belief in the importance of the separation of church and state," Behlendorf says. The resulting Web server was a collective effort, and contributors would have been offended if a few in the group had tried to produce a commercial product out of the open-source code, Behlendorf recalls of the 1995-96 period.

Behlendorf believes that the open source movement is now at a major crossroads ("tipping point") because it has moved from being centered in far-flung, independent development shops or studios and is becoming more crucial to day-to-day work in the established business world. "Look at Apache," he said. "It's been running 60% of all the world's Web sites for six years now. I think it's now up to about 67%; it increases something like .2% per month. That's pretty amazing, when you think about it."

Covalent Technologies, a leader in Web application management solutions, today announced Covalent Application Manager (CAM) is the first complete management solution for the open source stack. Covalent Application Manager manages all major open source Web application resources including Tomcat, Jboss, Linux, Apache, and MySQL, solving the current "Achilles heel" of enterprise open source adoption. Covalent also announced momentum for this solution with the signing of two enterprise customers.

The customers utilizing CAM to manage their open source stack are La Quinta, a hotel chain with more than 360 properties in 33 states, and National Semiconductor, an analog technology company with yearly sales over $1.67 billion. This customer adoption is testament to the power of CAM to manage the growing number of open source resources deployed in the enterprise.

Apache has a significant percentage gain this month as register.com, a leading domain registrar with a domain parking system serving responses for over one million domains eliminated its Windows front end, and reverted to Linux and Apache which it ran previously. Barely weeks ago its largest rival, Network Solutions made a similar switch from Microsoft-IIS back to SunOne, nee Netscape-Enterprise, for its own domain parking system.

Primarily a bug fix, Version 1.3.28 improves on 1.3.27 with more than a dozen patches including a new "ap_register_cleanup_ex" API function which allows for a "magic" cleanup function to be run at register time rather than at cleanup time.

The Apache Software Foundation on Monday released a new version of its open-source Web server project to plug four potentially serious security holes

Apache is far and away the most popular web server, with more than double Microsoft's market share. But perhaps market share is the wrong term, since anyone can download and install Apache free of charge. It is an open source product, maintained by the the Apache Project, which describes itself as "a collaborative software development effort aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely available source code implementation of an HTTP web server."

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