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Netscape Enterprise Server, Now Open Source

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Jan. 16th, 2009 | 10:27 am

Last year when Sun acquired MySQL I did a tour of a few of the campuses meeting different engineers to see what they did with Sun. At some point last year I met up with a group in Menlo Park who had been working on a webserver at Sun. Low and behold it was the evolutionary grandchild of what was the Netscape Enterprise Server. After talking to the engineers I wrote a few internal letters to see if we could push the code out as BSD so that others could learn/use/maybe even migrate if they wanted to. I am happy to say that Sun has decided to make the release happen:


This marks another milestone in the very long history of this web server. Back in the 90's this was the Netscape Enterprise Server, which later morphed into the iPlanet Web Server during the Sun|Netscape Alliance. After some years it was renamed the SunONE Web Server and most recently renamed again to the JES Web Server (Sun just like to keep you confused, thus the constant renaming of the product!)


Whether or not this is the first project Sun has published under the BSD license or not I am unsure of (thought many think it is... but seeing who one of the founders of Sun was, wouldn't it be odd if it was?)

Link to the project http://blogs.sun.com/jyrivirkki/date/20090113

And yes for those who also ask, I've had no luck getting ZFS moved to the GPL, let alone the BSD license. But I will keep asking internally :)

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Comments {11}

Dossy

(no subject)

from: dossy
date: Jan. 16th, 2009 07:30 pm (UTC)
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Thanks for the news! I remember being at AOL (while they owned the Netscape asset) hoping that someone would free that poor beast and open source it. Glad it's finally happened ... pity that Sun gets the credit and not AOL, but that's AOL for you these days.

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Collabra server

from: ext_143730
date: Jan. 16th, 2009 08:55 pm (UTC)
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I don't suppose you could work some similar magic on Netscape Collabra Server? For those that don't know, its basically a LDAP-aware NNTP server (hacked up from INN). It wasn't developed after the server line moved to iPlanet, and hasn't had an update in perhaps ten years.

The reason I'd like it is that one of my sysadmin duties involves running one of these servers - its still a core part of our portal infrastructure. If I had the code I could actually fix a few things and add a few features that we'd like, since I doubt its going away anytime soon.

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Aaron

Re: Collabra server

from: sodabrew
date: Jan. 16th, 2009 09:29 pm (UTC)
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+1. Collabra server was the first time I saw a real, working, useful LDAP environment in the late 90's. The product was always mismanaged, but the software itself could even today raise the state of the art. Same for the Calendar server!

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Re: Collabra server

from: anonymous
date: Jan. 17th, 2009 12:36 am (UTC)
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+1 for Collabra too. The INN development team would certainly love to be able to play with its source and borrow from it.

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Re: Collabra server

from: ext_143757
date: Jan. 17th, 2009 01:13 am (UTC)
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+1 for Collabra and Calendar Server! Would love to see Sun open-source both of those products....

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Re: Collabra server

from: ext_143730
date: Jan. 17th, 2009 01:44 am (UTC)
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Not sure what your chances are like with Calendar server since they licensed the core of it from elsewhere and that product now forms part of Oracle's collab suite. But yes, it would be cool.

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(no subject)

from: anonymous
date: Jan. 17th, 2009 06:57 am (UTC)
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AOL took the browser and Sun took the server platform during the breakup of netscape. So AOL was never in a position to open source the server stuff, and deserves no credit. This karma belongs squarely on Sun.

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At long last!

from: ext_143908
date: Jan. 18th, 2009 02:25 am (UTC)
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Wish I hadn't gotten rid of that Kaveh Bassiri's book now with all the guts of how NSAPI works! :)

It's great to see stuff like this getting out as open source - brilliant folks involved in the construction, and it was tragic to see it hidden for so long.

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