[CLUG] Red Hat acquires AOL's Netscape server software

[Mark Twomey]

On Sep 30, 2004, at 5:41 AM, adam beecher wrote:

> Red Hat plans to release the Netscape Enterprise Suite as open-source
> software, meaning that anyone will be able to use, modify and 
> redistribute
> the products.

And they'll need to get people developing it.
We were running a customer on it (The customer refused to move off it) 
a while back and Netscape Application Server was so crummy that not 
only did it account for the majority of that particular sites support 
calls, you needed some one on the box to debug it's start up process as 
it would crash out and then refuse to restart in a multitude of 
different ways. You couldn't even cluster it as we found that the bulk 
of the time the system would just plain refuse to start up on another 
node without a lot of manual troubleshooting.

It's hideous.

Perhaps they spotted something in the code they think they can throw 
into RedHat Application Server, or maybe this is all they can do to try 
and catch up with Websphere, Weblogic, The Java Enterprise System and 
Oracle Application Server.

Who the hell knows, but either way it wouldn't be a product which would 
be on my shopping list if I were looking to drop some cash on an 
acquisition.

Mark.