DaveNet: Tuesday, September 23, 1997; by Dave Winer.
A Unix View
Trevor Zion Bauknight, trev@sc.edu, represents the Unix view of the Mac OS server market:Um, have to take issue with your WebStar Day editorial which suggests Apple thinks server developers ought to "Drop Dead."
Rhapsody is BSD 4.4 with a front-end to end all front-ends. BSD 4.4 comes equipped, as do most other flavors of Unix, with all manner of daemons and powerful scripting systems built right in. WebStar and its "clones" do an admirable job of bringing httpd to the MacOS with all its inherent limitations, but they are not up to the task of displacing Apache.
So instead of again taking issue with the fact that an Apple product is displacing one developed privately and separately, keep in mind what that product is and that it will inherently displace quite a lot of the third-party add-ons and band-aids which have held the MacOS together well past the time when it should have been completely reworked.
BTW, taking Frontier to Unix would, of course, be a step in the right direction. I'm not sure of comparable Unix object-database-oriented scripting systems. But it seems to me that putting such a system on top of a uniformly object-oriented OS with a myriad of built in daemon services and scripting languages and a beautiful, easy-to-build human interface would allow current powerful Frontier subsystems to take on new, entirely cool characteristics.
And I'm sure the MkLinux crowd would love it, in the meantime, as a bonus.
I sent Trevor a message of thanks. He perfectly stated the point of view that I'm responding to.
How incredibly arrogant! We're not talking about displacing Apache. We're talking about Mac OS web servers. In this market, Apache has to do the displacing.
Has he looked at all the software that runs behind our web servers? Has he met the developers? Looked at the websites? What are the inherent limitations? The Mac OS isn't multithreaded, BFD, our environment is. Look at the rich platform we've developed on top of the Mac OS. Nothing like it on Windows yet, or on Unix.
The Unix message is indeed drop dead. They look down their noses at us. How many F's do you see? Dude, I was a Unix user. I use a modern graphic OS with lots of apps. I don't think you can do a site like mine on Unix.
We deserve a better OS, for sure, but the cost of a Unix port is too big a price. Apple has made no offers to us, or responded to any of our openings to them. We know that it's a chaotic place, and understand. There are good people at Apple doing the best they can.
Mac OS web server people need to think for themselves. How much of your investment are you willing to throw out? And if you have to go somewhere, where do you want to go?
Dave Winer