Sun Webserver open sourced!

A little under six months from the original announcement, Sun has released its core Sun Java System Web Server source code under a BSD license.  You can read about it and download it here.  This brings us exciting new opportunities for cross-fertilisation with Apache and other web servers[1], and I intend now to spend some time in Sun’s newly-Free code.

The webserver is of course not Sun’s only product in the field.  Nor even the main one: Sun’s webstack supports Apache and other open source servers.  In the marketplace as a whole, it is by most measures an also-ran, alongside everything else other than Apache and Microsoft.  Nevertheless, it is reported to be quite substantially overrepresented at the top-end of the market, with a significant market share amongst Fortune 500 company sites.  I can’t quote statistics on the subject, but this makes sense based on high performance and the backing of a strong top-end company.

I’m not sure if it’s decent to say this from my position (working for Sun, though not on this particular software), but thanks Sun for another great contribution to the world!

[1] An example is Basant Kukreja’s sed filter module, which is already in Apache’s trunk.