 Microsoft move in on LAMP
Friday, 26 August 2005
Microsoft is going to release Visual Studio 2005 Express in 2006. As much as I am tempted, I won’t comment on that by the way. It will cost somewhere around AUD$89 and the word is that it may be released free as part of some promotions.
It will also release Microsoft SQL Server Express for free — limitations are that it will run on a machine with a single CPU.
Martin Taylor, Microsoft’s platform strategy general manager, points out that SQL Server 2005 Express would allow tables and files to be stored on a web page to increase a site’s functionality while simplified programming would be provided in Visual Studio 2005.
The editor of the O’Reilly OnLAMP.com Web site devoted to LAMP, who goes only by the name “chromatic,” said it is Microsoft trying to catch up to LAMP rather than the other way around. Developers 10 years ago found other tools to use while Microsoft was late to the Internet, he said.
LAMP, or Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/Python/PHP, is the operating system, web server, database and scripting language stack being talked about and picked-up by start-ups interested in building services on top of open source.
While I welcome access to a cheaper Microsoft development stack, especially for web pages, I can’t help but feel that Microsoft are missing the point on the attraction of the LAMP stack.
Now LAMP is free — sure, that’s a very common reason why it is widely used, but one of the primary reasons why LAMP is so popular is because it’s free in terms of licensing and free in terms of the languages and environments used. Visual Studio 2005 Express will include support for C#, C++ and J++.
But each of these — and in particular the libraries on which they rely — is proprietary technology from Microsoft. In the short term, Visual Studio 2005 Express may enable you to develop applications quicker, but down the line you are locked in to continuing development with those tools and applications, and vendor lock-in, of any type, is never a good thing.
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