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open source middleware packages

The Open Source world excels in the server market; even major commercial organizations like Apple and IBM are using packages like Samba and Apache as part of their server platforms. No matter whose numbers you listen to, the Linux server market alone is going to keep growing for some time, and open source middleware is the reason behind that that.

• Network Services

  As stated above, the most wildly successful part of the Open Source movement -- many of these programs are the backbone of the Internet.

  • BIND -- The standard implementation of the Domain Name System, the system that converts host names to IP addresses, I would venture to call BIND the single most important Open Source program of all time.
  • sendmail -- For all its long history of showstopping security bugs, sendmail (the SMTP daemon that came out of the BSD project, both freeware and commercial versions) is the biggest mail transfer program on the Internet.
  • Apache -- Sixty percent of the web runs this as the primary server platform. Apache has essentially wiped out the market for all but a few niche freeware server implementations, and IBM even supports a commercial version.
  • Samba -- Once upon a time, an Australian hacker named Andrew Tridgell used a packet sniffer to clone the protocols used in DEC's Pathworks server system. Eventually he realized that the same protocol (NetBIOS) was in use by IBM and Microsoft for the OS/2 and Windows networking systems, and Samba has since developed into the de facto open source reference implementation of the protocols, most often used to provide Windows file and print services from Unix servers. It is standard equipment on a number of commercial Unix packages, including all Linux distributions and MacOS X.
  • netatalk is the Mac-user's answer to Samba. A much simpler program to deal with, netatalk provides file and print services to Mac users.

• Database Servers

  One of the two or three most successful open source middleware categories, open source databases run some of the largest websites out there. These systems generally don't have the enterprise-level scalability of their larger commercial cousins, but they do the job exceptionally well.

  • PostgreSQL is an object-relational database system that originally developed out of the Ingres project at UC-Berkeley. It was transformed over the years into the SQLized Postgres95 by a couple of grad students at Berkeley, then finally became PostgreSQL in 1996. It is said to be the most standards-compliant of any open source SQL implementation.
  • MySQL -- Originally a quasi-commercial system, MySQL went GPL and is now probably more popular than PostgreSQL.

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