ZDNET UK: An app server free-for-all

[ Thanks to Henri Bergius
for this link. ]

“Having first challenged Microsoft, the open source movement is
now taking on Sun, Oracle and stock market highfliers like
Vignette. This time the battle is not over operating systems, but
free versus priced Web application servers….”

“Zope and Midgard, two open source application servers aimed
squarely at the same tasks undertaken by Vignette’s StoryServer or
Sun’s pair of products, have begun to win a substantial number of
fans.“

“Although both are open source in the true sense of the term
­ the code can be inspected, freely modified and redistributed
without royalty ­ surprisingly both Zope and Midgard were
spawned by commercial projects, rather than the academic or
utilitarian efforts that gave rise to Linux and Apache. Zope is the
product of Digital Creations, a US firm that started giving Zope
away in 1998, when New Jersey venture capitalist Verticality
Investment Group agreed that Zope ­ then called Principia ­
could only capture a small share of a market dominated by firms
with big marketing budgets.”

Complete
Story