Resin and the GPL
- By Matt Stephens
- May 31, 2005
The rather excellent Java application server, Caucho Resin, was quietly open-sourced recently, so that it’s now licensed under the GPL.
For years, Resin has been the equivalent – both functionally and in terms of its target market – to Apache’s open-source Java servlet/JSP engine, Tomcat. However, Resin has always had the edge in terms of performance and ease of use. Being a commercial product, Resin has also been the proprietary alternative, hence hasn’t quite reached the same level of popularity as Tomcat (Tomcat also being the official servlet/JSP reference implementation endorsed by Sun) – this despite some quite liberal licensing terms.
So the move to make Resin open-source is more significant than it may seem at first. The odd thing is, Caucho really sort of slipped this one through very discreetly with the release of 3.0.9; all very hush-hush for such a major thing, without any big announcements. Is this what they really mean by stealth marketing..?
Being a commercially driven company, Caucho still offers a “souped-up” version of Resin, Resin Professional.
There’s some interesting speculation about the differences between the two versions here.