tgrissom asks: "I work for a municipal government whose policy is to have support contracts on all software that operates mission-critical applications. Some of our web mapping applications have begun to use Apache Tomcat as their preferred java servelet engine. (They used to use Macromedia jRun, needless to say I am ecstatic about the change as I use Apache at home and in various other project arenas). My issue, however, is that I am being asked to find someone to be the 'supporting agency' and myself, my friends, my geek network, and the open-source community at-large are not acceptable replies. To cut to the point - does anyone out there use a reputable open source contractor to provide technical support for Apache Tomcat and if so, can you provide their contact information? Thanks for your consideration and response."

darthcamaro writes "The folks at internetnews.com are reporting that the Spam Assassin project has been promoted to a full top level Apache Software Foundation project..the project has been in incubation for a while and it's finally made it through...the article also reveals that Apache is now using Spam Assassin themselves: 'I think spam filtering is now a critical part of the network infrastructure and Spam Assassin is a leader in the area,' said Daniel Quinlan, chairman of the Apache Spam Assassin Project Management Committee."

Thalinor writes "The RFP for OSCOM.4 is now out. The theme of OSCOM.4 (Open Source Content Management Conference) is "Cross-Pollination". This will be a conference with assistance from the Apache Software Foundation for the ApacheTracks content. OSCOM.4 happens from Sept 29 - October 1, 2004 in Zurich, Switzerland. The deadline for proposals is July 15, 2004."

joshmccormack writes "On June 6th Henning Brauer, an OpenBSD developer announced on one of the OpenBSD mailing lists that the version of Apache shipped with OpenBSD will stay with 1.3.29, due to Apache's license changes. There will be bug fixes, but no more updates. Discussion on blogs, websites and mailing lists on what's next bring up some interesting ideas and strong opinions. Difference of opinion and control have been catalysts to the growth of OpenBSD in the past. Will this be like the birth of pf in OpenBSD, or even the start of OpenBSD itself?"

jg21 writes "BEA's senior product manager, Carl Sjogren, just announced at on the keynote podium at eWorld in San Francisco that Beehive, BEA's open-source project announced last week, is today officially accepted by the Apache Software Foundation as an Apache project. So what used to be WebLogic Workshop is truly now no longer proprietary. CA is busy trying to follow suit. There's no confirmation yet on the ASF site, but deploying Beehive on Tomcat is the next aim, followed by ports to whatever other containers folks can devise." Here's the press release.

Orbital Sander writes "According to the Apache News Blog, the Geronimo project has voted in favor of applying to be a top-level Apache project. Geronimo aims "to produce a large and healthy community of J2EE developers tasked with the development of an open source, certified J2EE server, that is ASF licensed and passes Sun's TCK reusing the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today and adding new code to complete the J2EE stack." So far, Geronimo has lived in the Apache Incubator."

Kyle Hamilton writes "The Apache Software Foundation today announced that its HTTP Server platform has reached a milestone of eight consecutive years of World Wide Web technology leadership. Since its first release in April of 1995, the Apache HTTP Server has become as pervasive as the Web itself. According to two separate and independent surveys, the Apache HTTP Server, which originally established itself as the leading web server technology in April 1996, continues to acquire even greater market, growing faster than all other competing web server technologies. Achieving eight straight years of technology leadership confirms that the open source model works. Apache is now successfully deployed in a diverse set of environments, from large commercial entities to small nonprofit organizations. We are grateful to the community for their continued support and participation in the development process, said Sander Striker, Vice President of the Apache HTTP Server Project. We are firmly committed to continuing to provide the most accessible and standards-compliant Web server platform in existence."

ashmodai9 writes "According to this article on LinuxToday.com as well as this press release directly from their site, Novell announced that its "Connector for MS Exchange Server would be integrated into Evolution 2.0 and made available as open source, beginning today with the current Connector 1.4." Apparently, downloads will be available for the current version of Evolution starting May 14th." Thanks to reader crafterm, a snippet from Novell's Connector website: "With the Connector for Microsoft Exchange installed, Evolution functions as an Exchange client, enabling users to become full participants in company-wide group scheduling and other collaborative tasks. Linux and Solaris users can access public folders, Global Address Lists, email, calendar, task lists, and group scheduling information." Update: 05/11 17:58 GMT by T : In related news, ChiralSoftware writes "Codeweavers' long-awaited sequel to Crossover 2.1 is here. Just like the old version, the new version lets you install MS Office on Linux desktops. The new version adds support for Outlook XP, Lotus Notes and Microsoft Project."

efranco writes "Apache Software Foundation had released today a new version of the 1.3.x Apache webserver branch. How long this branch will last? Despite the interesting new features introduced in the 2.0.x branch, it seems that the branch 1.3.x is still the most used around the world." Errr, is PHP playing nicely with Apache 2 yet?

thejackol writes "The co-founder of the Apache Web Server Project and the First Chief Engineer at Wired Magazine was interviewed by Netcraft's Rich Miller about Netcraft's growth, the SCO case's unexpected benefits and changing the world through software. Excerpt: 'It's a good rebuke to the cynical but widespread notion that all it takes is a big pot of gold to litigate your competition out of existance or otherwise win a legal challenge. Good did prevail in the end. Hopefully it won't make us too cocky, because the next challenge could be much harder to fight.'"

Dain Sundstrom writes "The Geronimo team is pleased to announce the availability of our first milestone release, 1.0 M1. M1 marks the first of many milestone releases to come. This milestone integrates the main container components: Geronimo, MX4J, Jetty, OpenEJB and ActiveMQ. It has been amazing to see our communities come together and show such strong support for Apache Geronimo. There is still much work to be done on this integration and we look forward to fostering more collaboration between our projects to create an even more unified M2. As this is our first release and bound to draw a lot of attention, we have put together a thorough set of release notes which detail the current state of Geronimo. We advise that this is simply a milestone release and is not for general use, nor is it any indication of a final release. Our goal with this release is to start out slowly with a base set of functionality and gather some initial feedback that we can incorporate into future milestones."

An anonymous reader writes "PHP and SQL Security are being proven more weak every day. Uberhacker.Com is running a PHP and SQL security research project to raise awareness of secure scripting. The site hosts guides to secure PHP programming, forums, and scripting challenges to see who can create the most secure scripts."

JohnA writes "After what seemed to be a 30 year beta period, the Apache Jakarta team has made available the final release version of Velocity 1.4. If you're not familiar with Velocity, it's one of the most powerful and popular templating engines around. And, as an added bonus, a DreamWeaver plugin was also released."

michael path writes "SecurityFocus released two updated Apache vulnerabilities, one affecting 2.0.x (a DOS vulnerability), the other affecting both the 1.3.x and 2.0.x revisions (a buffer overflow). IBM HTTP Server is also affected by these vulnerabilities in similar version numbers."

hardburn writes "One of the stated goals of the Gopher Manifesto (previously mentioned on Slashdot) was to create a Gopher plugin for Apache. That goal has now been realized with the release of Apache::GopherHandler. Get it off Gopher itself or off CPAN."

darthcamaro writes "internetnews.com is running a story about the new Apache 2.0.49 release. They actually got a hold of a pair of Apache Software Foundation members and got them to speak out about the 1.3.x vs. 2.0.49 debate! Also Apache Director Sander Striker told internetnews.com that he expects the Apache 1.3.30 release cycle to begin this week... I still use 1.3.x because I've been using the Apache 1.x series 'forever' and I've never found a solid reason to change. Also, as pointed out in this article, the official PHP documentation clearly states, 'Do not use Apache 2.0 and PHP in a production environment neither on Unix nor on Windows.'"

chipster writes "Apache 2.0.49 has been released today. This version addresses some bugs, as well as a few security issues. You can read about the new features here, and get Apache 2.0.49 here. Also available is the 2.0 ChangeLog."

Steve Loughran writes "The ASF board have put up on the Apache Web site, a page rebutting claims that the new ASL2.0 license is incompatible with the GPL, claims made by on an FSF page and covered in Slashdot last week.The key points are (1) The interpretation of the GPL license is not just the opinions of individuals in the FSF, it is designed to be rigorously defendable in a court of law. (2) Rather than look at opinions about compatibility, people should look at the ASF2.0 and GPL licenses to see if they really are compatible. (3) If you look at the two licenses, they really are compatible. This means there is nothing to stop you linking your [L]GPL apps against apache libraries, shipping them with apache applications, and the like." Of course, this is still up to debate.

Martin71a asks: "I have recently been tasked with managing our website. I come from a mainframe and VB background and have a team of 3 people to work with. Our manager is having us switch from IIS to an Apache web server later this year. In the more immediate future, I need a solution to distribute print to our customers through our website. Previously, we had developed our reports using HTML, but we need more professional looking reports with more basic printing functionality, such as paging, built in. We have been testing ActivePDF in which we develop the reports in Crystal then use ActivePDF to send [those reports] to a virtual PDF printer, which allows the user to view them. We like the solution because it doesn't require our customer to download anything, other than a PDF viewer. We've also experimented with Crystal Enterprise, although it was an older version that required either a Java plug-in, or ActiveX download. My concern is that AcitvePDF does not appear to be supported for an Apache server. Does any know of a similar solution that would be appropriate for an Apache server?"

__past__ writes "It seems that the XFree86 issue is not the only licensing battle currently fought in the FLOSS world: An update to the FSF's list of Free Software licenses lists the new Apache License, Version 2.0 (which has been discussed on Slashdot before) as not being GPL-compatible, due to a clause related to software patents." (Read on for more.)