RE: Support for Tomcat

Joe,

IBM does distribute all of the products I mentioned, Perl as part of a
PRPQ,
and Xerces as part of WebSphere. IBM has a little more control over
Xerces
because they have committers on the project. Xalan is another one that
IBM
distributes on the iSeries. IBM cannot tell the Apache Software
foundation
what to do, they may have some votes on the various projects. For
Tomcat,
Sun has the majority of committers.

I really don't think it matters though. If you find a bug in Tomcat, or
any of the
Apache Software Foundation's products, you will be plugged in directly
to
the developers if you report the bug through bugzilla. From experience,
I
can tell you that you will probably hear from the person who wrote the
code
within hours. With a product like WebSphere I doubt you will be so
lucky.
That is not to say that you won't eventually get to someone who can
help
and submit a request that may get a PTF if IBM can find three guinea
pigs
to test it. That will take about a month in my experience. With Apache

projects through the developers lists and bugzilla, two day is average

for bugs I have reported or submitted a patch for.

David Morris


>>> joepluta@PlutaBrothers.com 03/20/02 05:19PM >>>
> From: David Morris
>
> IBM does not need to support Tomcat. How can IBM support
> a product that they have no control over?

Tomcat is offered as an IBM solution for web serving, bundled as Bob
C.
pointed out with the 57xxDG1 product.  The only other open source
product
IBM distributes this way (other than their own Java toolbox) is the
powered
by Apache HTTP server.  Perl or Xerces are not part of a system
product.  So
how is a bundled version of Tomcat any different from a bundled version
of
Apache?  Or are you saying that IBM doesn't support the powerd by
Apache
server?

This is a very weird gray area, but one for which I have several very
specific questions:

Is the Apache HTTP server a licensed IBM product, or part of one?

Is the Apache server supported by IBM?

Is the Tomcat web application server a licensed IBM product, or part of
one?

Is Tomcat supported by IBM?

If the answers are different for Tomcat than Apache, why?

I'm going to fire off a similar question to John Quarantello over at
IBM and
see if he can shed some light on this issue...

Joe