451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
There is no L in Sun’s LAMP
Matthew Aslett, February 11, 2009 @ 6:02 am ETYesterday Sun introduced Glassfish Portfolio. Its a new stack of open source middleware products including Glassfish Enterprise Server, Glassfish ESB, Glassfish Web Space Server, and the new Glassfish Web Stack, which includes support for projects such as Tomcat, Memcached, Apache, PHP, Ruby and Python and a copy of MySQL Community.
It’s a pretty complete infrastructure stack. What it is not, however, is an integrated LAMP stack, despite Sun’s reference to it as such not once but twice on its press announcement.
Glassfish Portfolio runs on Linux of course, as well as Solaris, but it does not contain Linux (integrated or otherwise) or Linux services (although that is available elsewhere). When I asked Sun for clarification on Glassfish’s status as a “LAMP stack” the answer was that most people use the phrase as shorthand for an Apache middleware stack whatever operating system it was running on.
That might be true for some people and the AMP Stack, is already taken but I am sure many more would dispute this position. It is still curious that Sun’s should continue to be so vocal in its use of “LAMP”. The result is probably one of two things:
- It draws attention to Linux, the one part of the stack that Sun does not own.
- It de-values the role of Linux as the underlying platform for the majority of modern web computing environments.
I doubt Sun would set out to deliberately do the first of these, which suggests that it is attempting to do the second. After all, it’s not the first time that Sun’s has played fast and loose with the definition of LAMP. Last year Jonathan Schwartz told Charles Babcock that “the ‘L’ doesn’t have to be taken literally” prompting Amanda McPherson to take him to task.
I believe Sun has an absolute right to compete with Linux, but its misuse of LAMP does it a disservice and can only serve to antagonize would-be customers who do very much care that their middleware stack runs on Linux. If Sun wants to market Glassfish Portfolio as an integrated LAMP stack it needs to come with Linux services (even if it is just for paying customers, as is the case with MySQL support).
Without Linux, it’s not LAMP.
Comments (9) Categories: Linux,Software
You forgot the G, too
It’s not just Linux, it’s GNU *and* Linux. (I call it GLAMP).
Good point, but LGAMP makes more sense (mind layers).
I believe you are overlooking the fact that Sun does make significant contributions to and indeed offer services for Linux – http://www.sun.com/software/linux/
I did in fact mention that Linux services are available from Sun. That doesn’t make Glassfish Portfolio an integrated LAMP stack.
We are forgetting Java, Ruby etc
LSAMJRP
[...] There is no L in Sun’s LAMP I believe Sun has an absolute right to compete with Linux, but its misuse of LAMP does it a disservice and can only serve to antagonize would-be customers who do very much care that their middleware stack runs on Linux. If Sun wants to market Glassfish Portfolio as an integrated LAMP stack it needs to come with Linux services (even if it is just for paying customers, as is the case with MySQL support). [...]
As a result of Sun’s failure to kill off Solaris, like HP and IBM have killed off their Unixes, making it trivally easy for Red Hat to pillage their shareholders, I think we should take Sun to task, and shut them down. Those rat bastards, how dare they try to behave like rational business people.
Uh, this is the real Peter Yared, I have no idea who posted that last comment, it came up in my Google Alerts. LAMP or SAMP, it’s no difference to me, the OS is irrelevant at this point.
Thanks for the clarification Peter