Shining Light on Why Microsoft Loves LAMP to Death

Here's an interesting little tale:

I was fortunate enough to spend last Thursday with a group of LAMP engineers who have some experience with Windows Server and IIS, and who are based in Japan.

The three - Kimio Tanaka, the president of Museum IN Cloud; Junpei Hosoda, the president of Yokohama System Development; and Hajime Taira, with Hewlett-Packard Japan - won a competition organized by impress IT and designed to get competitive LAMP engineers to increase the volume of technical information around PHP/IIS and application compatibility. The competition was titled "Install Maniax 2008".

A total of 100 engineers were chosen to compete and seeded with Dell server hardware and the Windows Web Server 2008 operating system. They were then required to deploy Windows Server/IIS and make the Web Server accessible from the Internet. They also had to run popular PHP/Perl applications on IIS and publish technical documentation on how to configure those applications to run on IIS.

The three winners were chosen based on the number of ported applications on IIS, with the prize being a trip to Redmond. A total of 71 applications out of the targeted 75 were ported onto IIS, of which 47 were newly ported to IIS, and related new "how to" documents were published to the Internet. Some 24 applications were also ported onto IIS based on existing "how to" documents.

So let's just deconstruct that, shall we?

A competition was held in Japan "to get competitive LAMP engineers to increase the volume of technical information around PHP/IIS and application compatibility"; they were given the challenge of getting "popular PHP/Perl applications on IIS", complete with documentation. They "succeeded" to such an extent, that "71 applications out of the targeted 75 were ported onto IIS, of which 47 were newly ported to IIS".

But that wasn't the real achievement: the real result was that a further 47 PHP/Perl apps were ported *from* GNU/Linux (LAMP) *to* Windows - in effect, extracting the open source solutions from the bottom of the stack, and substituting Microsoft's own software.

This has been going on for a while, and is part of a larger move by Microsoft to weaken the foundations of open source - especially GNU/Linux - on the pretext that they are simply porting some of the top layers to its own stack. But the net result is that it diminishes the support for GNU/Linux, and makes those upper-level apps more dependent on Microsoft's good graces. The plan is clearly to sort out GNU/Linux first, before moving on up the stack.

It's clever, and exactly the sort of thing I would expect from the cunning people at Microsoft. That I understand; what I don't get is why these LAMP hackers are happy to cut off the branch they sit on by aiding and abetting Microsoft in its plans? Can't they see what's being done to their LAMP?

Not Another Open Source Blog...

Or rather, not just *any* old open source blog, but a new gig for me, called Open Enterprise:

I'll be looking at all levels of the enterprise open source stack – from GNU/Linux distros, through middleware up to the top-level apps – at web services (most of which run on free software stacks like LAMP), writing about the companies working in these sectors, old and new alike (start-ups welcome), and the communities of users and developers that have formed around them (or not, as the case may be).

As well as detailed analysis of the latest goings-on, there will be longer, more speculative pieces about emerging trends or issues, including legal and social ones – vitally important aspects for free software. Another key thread will be interviews with the leading players in this sector – both coders and the corporate types, along with a sprinkling of key individuals in related areas like security and copyright.

Since free software is global, postings to this blog will naturally report on anything of note happening anywhere in the world; but it will do it from an unashamedly European viewpoint. And don't expect me to be too serious all the time: after all, this free software stuff is meant to be fun as well as useful.

And if you're wondering where that leaves leaves old opendotdotdot, fear not:

Alongside this content you'll notice plenty of posts from my other blog, Opendotdotdot, popping up. This has been going for two years now, and has a couple of thousand posts about the general culture of openness, including open source and related areas like open access and open content. This new blog is designed to complement that material by concentrating on the business side of things, although inevitably there'll be some overlap between the two.

So basically, heavier enterprise stuff will go in the new blog, while general cultural stuff will appear here and be mirrored there: my hope is to cover even more of the openness spectrum.

OSA Alert Alert

A few months back I wrote a feature about the importance of making open source apps play nicely with each other. One of the key players here is the Open Solutions Alliance. A good place to find out more about this organisation is its newsletter, whose latest edition has just appeared.

Blogging Open Stack Integration

One of the great but rather submerged stories in the open source world is stack integration. With the exception of the LAMP stack, free software solutions have been rather fragmented, with little inter-project coordination. One important development in this space is the creation of the Open Solutions Alliance, whose main task is ensuring better cooperation between disparate products.

I wrote about this recently, and I notice that the OSA blog is quite active at the moment. It's a good place to find out what exactly is happening in this important but neglected area.

The Penguin Goes to Redmond

Well, to Redmond Magazine, that is....

Red Hat's Stack Attack

I've commented on Red Hat Exchange before, but now there's something to see: essentially, a roll-call of the leading open source enterprise apps - and the next frontier for free software.

How the Stacks Stack Up

The ever-interesting Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who goes back a long way in the free software world, has a fascinating article about a comparison of two application stacks, one open source, the other from Microsoft. The results were surprising:

The tests showed that such vanilla LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/PERL) stacks as SLES (SUSE Enterprise Linux Server) 9, Zope, ZODB, and PHP and a pure LAMP based on SLES, produced "C" results. They weren't bad, but they weren't anywhere near as good as an out of the box .NET stack based on Windows Server 2003, IIS (Internet Information Server), SQL Server 2005, ASP (Active Server Pages), and SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

The results mirror those of the Mindcraft tests back in the late 1990s, when GNU/Linux found itself whupped by Microsoft. But the consequence was a range of improvements that soon took free software past Windows. However disappointing the current outcome for the stack tests may be, I'm sure that the same will happen here.

Remember: every bug report makes open source stronger, and the same goes for adverse benchmarks.