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Server wars: Open-source Java vs Weblogic and WebSphere

Open source is winning the Java application-server war in the age of the cloud, according to a new survey.

Web application performance company New Relic released results of its recent study on commercial vs. open-source Java application server usage among enterprises. The result: open source is winning by an overwhelming margin when it comes to web applications.

New Relic surveyed 1,000 customers to get some data on the state of open-source in business today. According to the results, over 80 percent of enterprise users across five main industries (business software, consumer internet, ecommerce, gaming, and social web) are using … Read more

How SpringSource is taking on Java Goliaths

Some argue that open-source software can't innovate. In fact, one of the industry's former executives, Peter Yared, recently argued that "the only successful open-source companies sell commodities."

Yared clearly hasn't heard of SpringSource, an open-source application platform provider that is redefining the J2EE application server and, quite possibly, the future of open source.

Yared isn't alone in his beliefs. A friend recently wrote me to suggest that open source is at its best when disrupting big, profitable markets:

Commercial open source is a (commodity) replacement market. When it is not (i.e., people are … Read more

Apple's October update fixes 20 security flaws

With the release of its Apple SA-2008-10-09 security update on Thursday, the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer company provided patches for nearly two dozen software flaws.

Some of the fixes included in the update, which can be obtained from Apple's Software Downloads page, are specific to Apple features, such as Single Sign On, Finder, and ColorSync. But the release also addresses an error introduced in Mac OS X 10.5.5. Other fixes are updates to open-source projects, including Apache, ClamAV, PHP, and Tomcat.

Apache This patch affects users of Mac OS X v10.5.5 and Mac OS X … Read more