This is the beauty of open source. Apache 1.3 is still widely used, and many products are still based on it. If the Apache Foundation no longer wants to maintain it, others are free to pick it up and carry on. I wouldn't be surprised if this happened sooner rather than later.
But it's their time to spend as they want. There are people working on a new port of Firefox to Mac OS 9 (Classilla). That's an operating system that hasn't been updated in 10 years. But if people are having fun doing this, that's great. If the product was closed source, there would simply be no option.
Well seeing as how they decided to not support non-native G3/G4 Macs for OS/X, we had $4,000(actual value at the time, not the price we paid retail) of beige Macs suddenly worth $0; when Mozilla/Firefox stopped supporting them as well, we couldn't even give the things away though they ran faster than some of the native G3/G4 machines we had. I tossed the last one of them onto the curb last year after I couldn't find a decent Linux distro or otherwise for it.
Not exactly, one fundamental advantage is that it used Pascal strings mostly, avoiding the problems of C strings. I once read a old Slashdot comment on the security advantages, and it made me even more sad about the failure of the Copland project, which would have been probably much more secure than Mac OS X ended up being.
Good point, Pascal strings are more secure. But on the other hand the lack of protected memory and multiuser security model are less secure. I guess advantage may still be with the pascal strings, but I'm not sure.
The reason specifically mentioned in the article for Mac OS 9 being more secure was the lack of remote (or local) shell access which is what I was thinking of as a major liability for end users, at least for me.
Yes, the "beauty of open source" is that people waste time and energy on an obsolete product. Reminds me of Microsoft.
From Webster's, "obsolete": 1 a : no longer in use or no longer useful b : of a kind or style no longer current : old-fashioned
Whilst Apache 1.3 may very well fit the second definition, it certainly doesn't fit the first. It it still useful for a great many people, particularly those who serve static content for a single domain. They have no use for virtual directories and multiple domain hosting, or many of the Apache 2 features that have caused so much bloat and resource consumption.
Whilst Apache 1.3 may very well fit the second definition, it certainly doesn't fit the first. It it still useful for a great many people, particularly those who serve static content for a single domain. They have no use for virtual directories and multiple domain hosting
I've been using vhosts and multiple domain hosting on 1.3 for the past 10 years or so.
Yes, the "beauty of open source" is that people waste time and energy on an obsolete product
That's not what "obsolete" means. Fact is that httpd 1.3 does more than everything we need in less memory than any 2.X version. It also has had less than half the security vulnerabilities of the 2.X branch. Over the past 8 years that secure code base has saved something like one engineer-month (~$10K) in upgrades alone. But then I'm lazy, and happy to have better things to do than upgrade software for no good reason.
Unfortunately, NIH syndrome is endemic to software engineering. As a result we get stuc
The thing is, it'd take someone with both considerable energy and a good name to manage it - when a product is declared dead, pretenders might pop up like weeds but, just like the French/Iranian/Prussian/Russian/Persian royal family, nobody takes them seriously.
So after a project dies it forks off into a slew a Legacy systems all needed independent modifications and changes. That is the Ugly side of Open Source to me. A more beauty side is if the tools that did need to work on 1.3 once apache stopped 1.3 support went and modified their apps to work on newer web browsers.
Forking code to keep your project going is not the way, it is just a bad idea.
If it forces people to upgrade to a better alternative, then maybe it is. Think IE6 - would it be better to maintain that ongoing (considering that many of the things the Slashdot groupthink wants to fix with IE6 are the explicit reasons why some companies are keeping it around) or kill it dead and have people upgrade?
So after a project dies it forks off into a slew a Legacy systems all needed independent modifications and changes. That is the Ugly side of Open Source to me.
Unless all the owners of the legacy systems got together and formed some sort of.. foundation to maintain the old version. They could all share the code and benefit from the modifications. They could call it something like the Apache Software Foundation (oops, I guess that one's already taken).
Kidding aside, the "problem" you describe has nothing t
I would guess that 1.3.42 is probably pretty stable, given that no new features have been added for years, and is only a minor update to version 1.3.41 which is over 2 years old as it is. So I would guess anyone still using 1.3 can continue with 1.3.42 for the forseeable future without worries. And if something really bad did come up, apparently they left the option of issuing a security update open.
"Laugh while you can, monkey-boy."
-- Dr. Emilio Lizardo
Open Source (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the beauty of open source. Apache 1.3 is still widely used, and many products are still based on it. If the Apache Foundation no longer wants to maintain it, others are free to pick it up and carry on. I wouldn't be surprised if this happened sooner rather than later.
Re:Open Source (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, the "beauty of open source" is that people waste time and energy on an obsolete product. Reminds me of Microsoft.
Re:Open Source (Score:4, Insightful)
But it's their time to spend as they want. There are people working on a new port of Firefox to Mac OS 9 (Classilla). That's an operating system that hasn't been updated in 10 years. But if people are having fun doing this, that's great. If the product was closed source, there would simply be no option.
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Wow, I can't believe there are people still using Mac OS 9. It was better than Windows 98, but that's about all it has going for it these days.
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That's true, but its security comes from its limitations. Doesn't really explain why anyone would want to run Firefox on it though.
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HTML5 Porn.
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Good point, Pascal strings are more secure. But on the other hand the lack of protected memory and multiuser security model are less secure. I guess advantage may still be with the pascal strings, but I'm not sure.
The reason specifically mentioned in the article for Mac OS 9 being more secure was the lack of remote (or local) shell access which is what I was thinking of as a major liability for end users, at least for me.
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But on the other hand the lack of protected memory and multiuser security model are less secure.
And Copland would have added support for this while preserving the security advantages that classic Mac OS had, which why it is sad that it filed
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What? OS9 doesn't even have any sort of per-process memory protection. The only way it could possibly be considered secure is through obscurity.
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Yes, the "beauty of open source" is that people waste time and energy on an obsolete product. Reminds me of Microsoft.
From Webster's, "obsolete": 1 a : no longer in use or no longer useful b : of a kind or style no longer current : old-fashioned
Whilst Apache 1.3 may very well fit the second definition, it certainly doesn't fit the first. It it still useful for a great many people, particularly those who serve static content for a single domain. They have no use for virtual directories and multiple domain hosting, or many of the Apache 2 features that have caused so much bloat and resource consumption.
I dare say that L
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Whilst Apache 1.3 may very well fit the second definition, it certainly doesn't fit the first. It it still useful for a great many people, particularly those who serve static content for a single domain. They have no use for virtual directories and multiple domain hosting
I've been using vhosts and multiple domain hosting on 1.3 for the past 10 years or so.
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Yes, the "beauty of open source" is that people waste time and energy on an obsolete product
That's not what "obsolete" means. Fact is that httpd 1.3 does more than everything we need in less memory than any 2.X version. It also has had less than half the security vulnerabilities of the 2.X branch. Over the past 8 years that secure code base has saved something like one engineer-month (~$10K) in upgrades alone. But then I'm lazy, and happy to have better things to do than upgrade software for no good reason.
Unfortunately, NIH syndrome is endemic to software engineering. As a result we get stuc
Re: (Score:2)
The thing is, it'd take someone with both considerable energy and a good name to manage it - when a product is declared dead, pretenders might pop up like weeds but, just like the French/Iranian/Prussian/Russian/Persian royal family, nobody takes them seriously.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So after a project dies it forks off into a slew a Legacy systems all needed independent modifications and changes. That is the Ugly side of Open Source to me. A more beauty side is if the tools that did need to work on 1.3 once apache stopped 1.3 support went and modified their apps to work on newer web browsers.
Forking code to keep your project going is not the way, it is just a bad idea.
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Why ugly? It's better than the project dying, period.
And one of those forks may become the new official version.
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The new official version exists. It's called Apache 2.2 (or 2.0, if you fancy old stuff).
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Yeah, because a project dying and all the people that still use it being left out in the cold is really an attractive alternative.
Not.
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So after a project dies it forks off into a slew a Legacy systems all needed independent modifications and changes. That is the Ugly side of Open Source to me.
Unless all the owners of the legacy systems got together and formed some sort of.. foundation to maintain the old version. They could all share the code and benefit from the modifications. They could call it something like the Apache Software Foundation (oops, I guess that one's already taken).
Kidding aside, the "problem" you describe has nothing t
Re: (Score:2)
I would guess that 1.3.42 is probably pretty stable, given that no new features have been added for years, and is only a minor update to version 1.3.41 which is over 2 years old as it is. So I would guess anyone still using 1.3 can continue with 1.3.42 for the forseeable future without worries. And if something really bad did come up, apparently they left the option of issuing a security update open.