Killer Open Source Ideas of the Past

The IT industry thrives on innovation. Just when you think everything is over
and nothing further can happen, up comes an innovation that sets the whole world
on fire. One of those innovations was the concept of Open Source and free
software. It's a movement that has truly revolutionized computing. While many
things can be attributed to the success of Open Source, there were some ideas
that really gave it the required push. Here are a few of them.

Apache Web Server

The Apache Project is an Open Source software that delivers a high
performance and highly flexible Web server. The popularity of Apache can also be
directly linked to the growth of the World Wide Web-since most sites were
running Apache at one point or the other.

The power of Apache comes from the ability to be able to extend it using
modules that provide all sorts of functionality-from giving WebDAV features to
URL redirection to automatic CAPTCHA image processing and more. This allows
developers and website owners to throw together a highly customized site
quickly. However, Apache's share in the Web server area has been declining
steadily in the past few months to just below 50% right now. But there is no
doubt that the growth that the Web has had is partly due to Apache.

Firefox

The web browser that rose from the source code of a dying web browser named
Netscape and made it big. An award winning browser, Firefox gained popularity in
the era of feature constrained and security flawed IE 6. Firefox offered tabbed
browsing and restricted pop ups and ActiveX. Available for Windows and Mac,
Firefox has been the default and de-facto browser in most Linux distributions.
Firefox has surely made an impact on the number of choices people had to browse
the Web.

Today, most websites or web portals mandate to become Firefox compatible
besides IE. After all Firefox shares more than 30% usage in the web browser
arena. Recently (on 21st Feb 2008) Firefox reached the mark of 500 million
downloads.

High Performance Clustering

Open Source can be called the father of commodity HPCs (high performance
clustering). HPCs got into mainstream application due to Open Source movement
and penetration of Linux worldwide, which made commodity HPCs a reality. And why
this happened, can be understood very easily. In the eighties and early nineties
the only way to deploy a Supercomputer or an HPC was to go to some highly
specialized companies like Cray, etc, then acquire a good bunch of specialized
hardware and software equipments and get them assembled. But owing to the
requirement of specialized hardware and software and the market niche, the cost
of the whole setup used to run very high, and it was not feasible for any
standard organization to own such a setup. Thus only big educational institutes
and government research centers could afford such HPCs.

But, in the mid nineties the concept of commodity HPCs came into picture. And
to build a commodity HPC only two things were required. First is of course the
commodity hardware by which we mean the standard PC and hardware equipments. And
the second thing is an HPC middleware which could be commodity. This second
requirement was very efficiently addressed by Open Source developers and in no
time we saw a plethora of Open Source HPC/SSI/Grid middleware available. Some
such noteworthy examples could be OSCAR, OpenMosix, ROCKS, Globus, etc.

Linux kernel

When in 1983 Richard M Stallman (aka RMS) gave the concept of GNU and
OpenSource, his sole motto was to promote the free availability of applications
that could run on Unix. With this the students could understand and learn how
exactly software codes work and could even modify them to add more features. The
biggest challenge for RMS at that time was that he had a concept of free
applications and he even had quite a few such applications, but the OS on which
those applications could run was Unix. So he was not that satisfied with the
whole thing.

Then in 1991, Linux Torvalds, whom we also know as the father of Linux, came up
with an idea of taking the freely available Minix code, created by Taninbam, for
teaching his students the internals of an OS Kernel. He modified it and added a
shell to create a UNIX-like OS. Once done with it he fired a mail to RMS saying
that he has created a UNIX-like kernel on which one can run most of the UNIX
applications and he wants to keep it under GNU's licensing. RMS accepted the
concept, and thus the problem of GNU of not having an Open Source OS got
resolved.

Live distros

One of the coolest things that this currently available in the Linux world
is the availability of 'Live Distributions.' These distros are specially made to
run off a removable storage-mostly CD or DVD media and even normal USB thumb
drives. The advantage of these live distros is that you can use them to boot
into almost any machine with Linux without installing the operating system or
disturbing any content already existing on the hard disks of the machine.

Live distros can be used for many things-learning Linux without sacrificing
your Windows machine, troubleshooting, disaster recovery, network management and
more. You also get tons of different 'flavors' of these distros specifically
meant for certain tasks. Seeing the usefulness and popularity of Linux based
live distros, you can now also create Windows based live media using both 3rd
party or Microsoft provided applications.

MySQL

Web 2.0 is powered, undoubtedly, by MySQL. We have Facebook, Flickr, YouTube,
Wikipedia and many more sites/portals using MySQL. The M in the LAMP and WAMP
stack refers to MySQL. It runs on platforms ranging from Linux, Windows, Mac and
different flavor of Unix. More than many open source products support MySQL as
the backend database and many uses it as the default database.

For customers, MySQL is offered under a dual licensing scheme (refer to the
article xxx) — i.e. Free without support or with commercial support. Web hosting
providers have been using MySQL to offer low cost web hosting with a database.
For developers, there exists MySQL native (besides ODBC) drivers for almost any
of your preferred language - .Net, Java, C/C++, Ruby, Perl and PHP.

For a long time, MySQL had lacked support of database features like stored
procedures, triggers and views. But all these came into being with MySQL 5,
almost two years back. Seems MySQL is all set for Web > 2.0.

PHP

PHP was first created as a programming platform that gave C like syntax for
dynamic web pages in the programming format of Microsoft's Active Server Pages.
PHP grew from a niche programming platform to a world wide popular method of
programming for dynamic sites.

PHP has always been hailed as the 'P' of the LAMP stack. Along with the
others-Linux, Apache and MySQL, it provides a low cost programming alternative
to other Web platforms. However, recently during the development of Windows
Server 2008, Microsoft and Zend (the creators of PHP) have worked closely
together to make PHP work better on Internet Information Server 7. This has
actually led to a scenario where using PHP on IIS7 actually gives PHP developers
a whole bunch of functionality out of the box, that they do not get with their
older counterparts. Since PHP itself is an Open Source application, it works not
just well but even better now on Windows Server 2008.

Samba

One of the first Open Source software to successfully bridge the gap that
existed between Windows and Linux users, Samba allowed accessing of files on a
Windows network share easily. Current implementations of Samba integrate well
into a Windows domain network as well as an Active Directory based setup.

Owing to the ease of adding a Samba-based server into an existing Windows
network, it came to be used primarily as a replacement for Windows Server on a
file server. The low cost and ability to make file shares on Linux machines also
look like Windows shares drove up the usage of Samba significantly. Although it
did run into copyright violation issues now and then, Samba is still going
strong for providing basic file sharing services

Sendmail

Sendmail is most widely used MTA on Internet and was originally designed for
Linux and Unix platforms. In early 1980s Eric Allman wrote Sendmail which was
first shipped in BSD 4.1c in 1983. Earlier Sendmail was known as delivermail
which was used to connect ARPANET mail to BerkNet mailer. With the rise of
email, Sendmail went on to become most popular program for mail routing and
delivery. In 1996, 80% of the public email servers were running Sendmail. Since
then there has been a downfall in its usage and it's been said that time of
Sendmail has passed, but Sendmail is still alive and kicking. Last year latest
version namely Sendmail 8.14.2 was released and according to a survey done last
year 29% of public mail servers are still running Sendmail.