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We love you, Ev This is the most moving, beautiful and difficult thing I've read in a long time. Ev and his team have been making the world, and we need to show how much that's worth to us. This isn't just about a new server. It's about service in the literal meaning of the word. Look out below Netcraft shows Microsoft IIS gaining on both Apache and iPlanet in Web servers. It's also almost up to a majority of e-Commerce servers. Here's the uh-oh: Microsoft makes consistent and relentless gains, month after month, and now accounts for 49% of the sites performing encrypted transactions on the internet. Arguably, Microsoft's applications have made the difference, with there being no straightforward alternative to Microsoft's Commerce Server in the Unix world. Building infrastructure The name I couldn't remember yesterday was OpenAdaptor, which is a banking technology developed by Dresdner Bank AG in Germany for its own purposes at a reported cost of about $5 million. It was released a couple days ago to the open source community, through Dresdner's investment bank and a partnership with Collab.net. This is all further complicated by the fact that after I left the announcement party I could accuratly remember the names of none of these parties other than Collab.net, and the various stories have links to approximately nothing related to the stories themselves. (One example.) I hate that. However, the real news here is that Dresdner, et. al. are asking what they can do for the Web, rather than what the Web can do for them (to borrow a Dave slogan). They're building infrastructure. Linux is already commodity infrastructure. That's the clearest fact at Linux World Expo. Now businesses are realizing the net gain (pun intended) of donating some of their internally-developed infrastructure to the trade — just as a builder would, in effect, donate a new and useful building method to everybody working in the building industry. The Net building trade needs more infrastructure to work with. OpenAdaptor is useful to everybody, including Dresdner. We're going to see more of this kind of thing. This is why Caldera introduced both a commercial product, Volution, and OpenSLP at the same time. It's also why Borland made its cross-platform class libraries, CLX, open source ... and also available under a commercial license. I discovered this yesterday at Borland's Kylix press conference. I've been watching Borland move toward Linux for almost two years now; but it wasn't until yesterday that I got the significance of its class libraries. Non-Borland people there were agreeing, with surprisingly little reservation, that CLX was infrastructural in a serious way. They offer what Java can't, which is something not owned by anybody. And they offer what .Net can't, which is building material for more than one platform. It'll be very interesting to see what happens. There isn't nearly enough about it so far. By the way, the take-away one-liner was from Borland CEO Dale Fuller, who compared CLX to .Net by calling it ".Now."
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