Re: What can we learn from MySQL?

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Andrew Payne wrote:

>
> Scott Marlowe wrote:
>
> > While Apache is and has been wildly popular for bulk hosing and domain
> > parking, for serious commercial use, Netscape's enterprise server, now Sun
> > One, has long been a leader in commercial web sites.
>
> Netscrape/SunONE may have been a leader in some sub-market, but this misses
> the point.

Not A submarket, THE submarket, enterprise class application server, i.e.
web commerce and such. Just because apache hosts hundreds of thousands of
personal web sites with all static content does not make it a "market
leader". When it came to commercial usage, apache still had to fight its
way to the top.

> Apache + NCSA never had less than 50% market share, overall.
>
> http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html

Again, if 98% of those sites are personal web sites with static content,
(they certainly were until a few years ago) and you remove those from the
counting, then you find out that in enterprise class web servers, apache
had sound competition it is only now starting to consume.

> Postgres is in a completely different situation: 95+?% of the world's
> databases don't run on Postgres, and it's been this way for a long time.

and some large percentage of the worlds app servers were running on
something other than apache for quite some time too.

If postgresql was ubiquitous as the database of choice for simple access
type applications, it would still have to earn its stripes in the
enterprise one at a time.

> My point: Apache was successful in a situation that may not apply here.

I agree that the situations aren't the exact same, but they're more
similar than most people realize. Apache was never a market leader in the
enterprise realm until fairly late in the 1.3.x series releases.

> Does anyone know of an open source project that *has* successfully displaced
> a market of mature, established products WITHOUT a commercial entity
> providing marketing, support & direction?

gcc?