The open source software community is poised to record its most significant victory yet, if the Industry Standard (http://www.industrystandard.com/) report that IBM will bundle Apache with its WebSphere ecommerce products turns out to be true. Apache is a free hypertext transfer protocol (http) server, one of the building blocks of the world wide web. It was developed by programmers in their free time working together on public source code. According to Netcraft (http://www.netcraft.com), more than half of all servers on the world wide web now run Apache or one of its derivatives. Large corporate sites, however, have tended to prefer proprietary solutions from Netscape and Microsoft, especially for the crucial application servers that underpin their electronic commerce sites. The fear is that free software is unsupported, working on the theory that you can’t get something for nothing. But what happens if you can? IBM wants to find out. Vice president Paraic Sweeney told the Standard that Big Blue will be following the Apache Group’s project very closely. The rumor mill promises much more. The bundled Apache and WebSphere products are expected to be announced on Monday. As Apache spokesperson and CTO of Covalent Technologies Randy Terbush says: The biggest thing about it is having a large corporate entity endorsing the usefulness of Apache software. Apache already has a decisive lead in the web server marketplace. With IBM providing applications, support and services, the sky’s the limit. The success of Linux and Perl, and more recently, the decision by Netscape to publish the source code to its Navigator browser have all been landmarks in the growing mainstream acceptance of free software. But can open source software become mainstream without losing the robustness and sense of community that makes it what it is? Terbush points out that platform-agnosticism is one of Apache’s greatest achievements. Our work has mainly been involved with creating a standard for http protocol, he explains, if you can imagine what would have happened if Netscape and Microsoft had been developing their own versions of http for the last few years… There’s a lot to be gained if corporate America chooses to accept that standard. Standards don’t tend to come out of corporations. What happens to free software standards that are accepted back into the corporate community. No one really knows.
