Over the past three and a half years, I’ve spent a good amount of time worrying about ways that Microsoft’s long-term plans and strategies could hurt the market share of Linux and Open Source. Well, about a week ago, I was having a conversation with Jeremy Zawodny (one of our senior editors), and he raised some points that made me realize something: it might just be Microsoft’s turn to be really worried. But not about Linux. (At least, not directly.) No, if I were Microsoft, I’d be much more worried about a little piece of software known as Apache.
Over the past three and a half years, I’ve spent a good amount of time worrying about ways that Microsoft’s long-term plans and strategies could hurt the market share of Linux and Open Source. Well, about a week ago, I was having a conversation with Jeremy Zawodny (one of our senior editors), and he raised some points that made me realize something: it might just be Microsoft’s turn to be really worried. But not about Linux. (At least, not directly.) No, if I were Microsoft, I’d be much more worried about a little piece of software known as Apache.
Now, I’ve never really believed that Linux or Open Source represented substantial threats to any of Microsoft’s entrenched franchises on the desktop. And as I said, until this past week, I’ve been much more worried about the threat that Windows and .NET pose to Linux on the server. But there is something very serious going on here with Apache 2.0.
With 2.0, Apache’s performance on Windows is now equal to its performance on Linux/Unix. By reaching parity, there’s no longer a penalty for deploying Web-based applications on Apache/ Windows. And of course, once you move Apache over to Windows, you’ve also got to take the whole rest of the Open Source computing stack along with it (Apache brings with it tools like MySQL, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Java, etc.).
That is definitely not what Microsoft wants to see.
But it was the example Jeremy used that really brought…
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