[PLUG] A note from my web hosting service

[Beldon Dominello <beldon@speakeasy.org>]

This note appeared, verbatim, in the occasional newsletter of my hosting 
company, Drak Net (http://www.drak.net):

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ASP, Microsoft, and other things...
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Since we opened, we've been an open source using company, and 
have used open source software almost exclusively with the 
exception of allowing people to use Microsoft Extensions - and 
that was something we did very, very reluctantly.

In our ferver to become competitive, we thought that ASP is 
something we would have to offer eventually depite the fact that 
proprietary software is something that goes deeply against the 
grain of what we believe in philosophically. As we looked at the 
ins and outs of installing this software, coupled with 
Microsoft's announcement this week that it would stop supporting 
Sun's Java by 2004, it only illustrated even more *why* we are a 
company running primarily open source software.

Open source is not only a methodology for creating software, 
it's also a political statement about ideas and the ownership of 
them - ownership vs. freedom, collaboration vs. monopoly. Many 
people use the software almost solely because of its 
proliferation onto desktops and we cannot agree with the 
practices they employed to get and maintain that proliferation.

There is a line between being competitive and selling your soul, 
and we believe that if we buy into ASP, .NET, and the other 
proprietary vehicles coming out of the Microsoft mentality and 
pay an exhorbinant amount of money to enable this technology 
here, we will have crossed that line for us.

There is also the fact that as a Unix server, we simply can't 
compete with an IIS server for IIS technology. It's a bit 
ridiculous to even try.

We give you as many open source options as we can - JSP, 
Apache::ASP, PHP. What we currently support enables you to do 
just about everything that you could do with Microsoft ASP - and 
from our cursury investigation it appears that JSP is 
considerably more powerful and versatile.

Other then Microsoft Extensions, we have made the decision that 
we will only employ open source software here. If that means we 
lose a competitive edge and some of our customers will go 
elsewhere so they can get the functionaity of Microsoft 
products, we completely understand and can live with that 
situation - anyone wanting to use Microsoft technology really 
shouldn't be on a Unix host in the first place in any case 
because it limits them at the outset regarding what they can do.

We will continue to support Microsoft FrontPage extensions for 
publishing in the same way we support FTP products that run on 
Windows machines because Microsoft does not require that we 
agree to a proprietary license or monetarily support their 
endeavors by doing so, but that's as far as we plan to go.

For more information about open source software and the 
philosophies surrounding it as a movement, visit 
http://www.opensource.org/

-- 
Distinctive, adj.:
	A different color or shape than our competitors.


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