Open Source is a fine development model, but with the obvious exception of Eric Raymond it kind of sucks at PR.
Okay, let's qualify that. There are some fine companies that get mileage out of Open Source as a virtue, but as an editor I can tell you that there too darn few pure open source projects with a PR department (we suspect that number is zero), or with much PR instinct, by which I mean they bother editors like me with interesting information about what they're up to. Sure, we get flamed to a cinder when we neglect to mention the obvious, such as early last year when we wrongly reported that Borland's InterBase was about to become first open source database project, earning the outrage of some PostgreSQL folks (though surprisingly few, considering). But there isn't much outreach by the growing assortment of nuts & bolts open source projects that simply make something handy that a lot of others can use.
Take proxy caching, which is very handy if you've got a lot of traffic to manage -- but not much of a conversation starter except for those who (for professional or other reasons) obsess about it.
As it happens there are more than a few obsessives out there, and one of them (I forget who) told me that Squid <www.squid-cache.org> is the cat's pajamas of open source proxy servers. Well, it seems there are a pile of commercial (presumably closed source, certainly not free) proxy servers in the world. You can get them from Lucent, Novell, IBM, Cisco, Lucent, Microsoft and other usual suspects. Their prices run from zero to six figures. Squid is at the bottom of that range. As their FAQ puts it, "You can download Squid via FTP from the primary FTP site or one of the many worldwide mirror sites. Many sushi bars also have Squid."
The product is competitive. Literally. A group called IRCache holds frequent bake-offs (which they now call cache-offs) using the Web Polygraph <polygraph.ircache.net>, a benchmarking tool developed by the National Science Foundation and a bunch of those same Usual Suspects. The results (also on the IRCache site) for each bake/cache-off run through many pages, many tables and many graphs. Squid leads in some places and lags in others, but it runs in the thick of every race.
Perhaps the most telling results come from this level-5 post from Matthew P. Barnson on Slashdot last year: "I can personally say that the three I've had experience with, Novell's ICS caches (which comprised ten of the twenty entrants), Network Appliance's NetCache, and Squid (on Solaris, in our case) all rock. Squid 2.3-stable1 was a dream to compile, install, and configure." When we contacted him directly, he added this about Squid: "As an outgrowth of "The Harvest Project", this venerable free software proxy cache sets the benchmark by which all other caches are measured... For the price, Squid kicks some serious butt!" He also has kind words for another open source project: "Apache Web Server was not specifically mentioned in the bake-off, but in my experience is extremely popular for caching services, because the same server that can serve your web pages from your dorm room can also speed up your web surfing." And he should know his stuff: he works at one of the most heavily visited sites on Earth.
So let's raise a glass of saki to the Squid team, and invite all the other open source and free software developers who envy this kind of coverage to let us know what they're up to.
-- Doc Searls