Recently we wrote about the rumours that Apple were considering the use of Intel as a supplier of CPUs for Macintosh computers. Well it turns out that the rumours may have been true after all. Cnet has an article claiming that Apple will ditch IBM PowerPCs in favour of Intel. Apparently an announcement from Apple is due on Monday.

This is not news likely to please Macintosh fans. The difference between the Mac and the Wintel PC is likely to become allot smaller and in fact may come down to only the style/appearance and OSX as differentiation. It isn’t likely to make developers all that happy either since all binary releases would have to be recompiled and possibly ported to the new platform. I guess the truth will be in the details and for those we’ll have to wait for Monday.

Often times, people ask me why I cover Open Source topics like Linux & Apache as well as related topics like the IBM/Novell/Redhat verses SCO case and also the issues related to software patents. Most specifically they ask me what these topics have to do with web development. Today I’ve decided to answer that and the truth of the matter is that Open Source software is more important to web developers then any other industry out there. Permit me me now to demonstrate.

Apache is an Open Source product. It is also the web server software hosting roughly 70 percent of the Internet. Linux and *BSD (both of which are Open Source Operating Systems.) are hosting most of those Apache installations. Windows is considerably more expensive to use as a Web server, because you must buy licenses on a per server basis and many of the hosts have thousands of servers. Were Open Source software to disappear, web hosting would probably double in price almost immediately as the hosts will definitely pass the extra MS license expenses onto their clients. So the first point is that Web hosting is exceptionally affordable almost entirely because of Open Source software. In fact Microsoft has lowered prices because of the fact that they are now competing against what is essentially a free or much cheaper product. Competition is always better for the consumer, of this there can be no doubt at all.

To demonstrate the second reason Open Source and it’s related issues are important to web development, let us consider the small up and coming developers. More often these people are fairly young, they don’t have allot of cash and they don’t often have a big company paying all their bills. So how does one such young person afford the several thousand dollars required to buy such software as Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash/Dreamweaver and the other proprietary software that the “professionals” prefer? Open Source software like The Gimp, NVU and MySQL not to mention Open Source programming languages like Perl, PHP and Python make web development accessible to anybody with imagination and a willingness to learn, money is no longer an object. Consider Google for example, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were a couple of young guys working to create Google from a garage, they could not afford to attempt such a thing using proprietary software so they used Linux instead. Now they are worth an estimated 7 billion dollars each. In fact to this day Google still uses Linux on it’s thousands of servers. The story is not that different at Yahoo either, most of their servers run FreeBSD. Likewise Amazon uses Apache on Linux. In short, Open Source software gives little guys the opportunity to become big guys.

Lets look at another aspect of the upcoming web developer. If said developer wants to set-up Blogs for a client, or perhaps e-commerce solutions, or maybe an online forum, he/she has two options, look for a proprietary product the cost of which must then be passed onto the client, or he can download and use free software like WordPress, OScommerce and Yabb and be more competitive as the only charge they need to pass on is the cost of their time. The site you are looking at now is running a fairly extensively modified copy of WordPress, and it’s running on a Linux server using Apache and PHP and Perl, just like most of the other such sites on the Internet.

So there you have it. That is why we cover Open Source issues like the current software patent problems that have the potential to damage the OSS community and the SCO verses IBM/Novell/Redhat litigation that threatened (unsuccessfully so far) to damage the reputation of OSS developers. You might be reading this on a Windows computer using Internet Explorer, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a stake in Open Source, particularly if you use PHP or Perl or host on a Linux/*BSD server running Apache.

In an effort to help spiders get your whole site, Google has taken the idea behind robots.txt files and applied it to site maps. Sitemaps won’t help you get a better ranking, but it will ensure that your entire site content is included in their index. The beta Sitemaps is an XML formatted file that the Googlebot can fetch and then use as a map to the rest of your site. The webmaster login is here, but it looks like they are getting allot of attention or are under active development as half the time it returns error messages. Learn more by reading “about sitemaps or read the FAQ. Spiders are fairly simple programs and can often miss parts of your site, this new beta gives you the opportunity to ensure that Google sees all your work. Technically sitemaps worked already, we’ve long used a simple page of links to the whole site to tell Google where to look, but this is an effort to formalize/standardize the process and that can only be a good thing.

According to the GoogleGuy, the best way you can ensure that search engine spiders get your sites content as expected, you should use absolute links rather then relative (meaning to use the full web address, including your domain name instead of just the pages file name and relative position) in your site menus. The downside of absolute links rather then relative is that your site is then less portable, but if that portability comes at the expense of search engine ranking then it’s probably not worth it.

Also of interest is the suggestion that if your site resolves with both www.example.com and just example.com you should choose one or the other and use a 301 (permanent) redirect to direct all requests to the chosen one. The main reason for that is probably to ensure your site is not penalised for duplicate content but it’s a good idea anyway, particularly if you use cookies on your site.

Former Microsoft PR man Sean Sundwall has stopped defending Microsoft’s actions and started defending 180solutions, the company that was behind the break-up of the anti-spyware consortium COAST (The other members where not happy that an alleged SpyWare company were allowed to join an anti-spyware group and as a result the group broke up.) 180solutions have been involved in some decidedly questionable tactics in the past and although they claim to be clean now, not everyone is in agreeance with them. Sean Sundwall has been instrumental in many of Microsoft’s PR efforts, so by putting Mr Sundwall on the payroll 180solutions are no doubt hoping will give them some creditability. Ironically not so long ago, Sean was making anti spyware press statements on behalf of Microsoft. Goes to show how much you can believe PR, their opinions appear to be directly related to their pay packet. Not a particulary surprising fact, but one that should definately be remembered when reading such PR material.

Google have announced their “Summer of Code” program, the purpose of which is to introduce students to the Open Source development process. Google will pay $4500 to each student that completes an OSS project by the end of summer.

The list of Open Source organizations supporting the program is a who’s who of the OSS community including such big names as Apache, Wine, Mono, KDE, Gnome, Net and Free BSD and OpenOffice.org among many others. Read more at Google’s Summer of code page.

Projects like this are of great benefit to the OSS community, they bring fresh ideas and new developers and they also raise the awareness of Open Source with the next generations. Google built most of their system using Open Source software like Linux so it is nice to see them giving something back. Other corporations should be encouraged to start similar projects. They get something back also, the chance to evaluate and hire new and emerging talents before they are snapped up by the usual suspects.

PC World has joined the rather large list of awarding companies for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. They awarded Firefox the “Product of the year” award and summarized it thus:

This open-source program is streamlined, customizable, and just plain better. No wonder it has attracted millions of users in just a few months. Is it merely a coincidence that Microsoft finally plans to give the aging Internet Explorer the major overhaul it has needed for years?

PC Worlds review of Firefox is fairly basic compared to some, but the conclusion is much like all the others. In short, other browsers may be better at a particular task then Firefox, but overall Firefox is the best general purpose web browser.

With over 60 million downloads, literally dozens of awards, growing market share statistics, and a soon to be released improved 1.1 version (currently in Alpha release) Firefox doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon.