RE: Squid Disinformation

I've been watching this thread with some sadness for a while. Before this
gets way out of hand, I wanted to say a few personal words about Inktomi. My
email address shows Inktomi, and I am the development manager for Traffic
Server, but at one point in time I poured a great deal of my thoughts and
efforts into Harvest (the father of Squid), as one of the original 4 cache
developers.

Since then, Duane and the other key contributors have taken that seed and
grown it into something truly special. You all deserve most of the credit.
I regularly talk to some of the early Harvest folks, and we all share a
pride in your success.

I joined Inktomi because of the unusual collection of bright, honorable,
hardworking, special people, and their dream of building unique distributed
software for the Internet. Inktomi is a different kind of company, and I
winced to see the discussion that's gone on recently. Inktomi has the
utmost respect for Squid, its heritage, and the people behind the effort.

This recent tempest was apparently launched from a quote cited in the UK.
As for the quote, I agree that it sounded less than flattering. I assume
their must have been some paraphrasing involved, or missing context, because
this certainly doesn't represent how we feel. We've done a great deal of
engineering to work along side, and be compatible with Squid, but I fear
we've been overly focused on making engineering progress, to the detriment
of our involvement with the Squid community.

Hopefully, you'll all keep an open mind with respect to Inktomi's
intentions, I'll commit to getting us more involved with the community.

Chuck Neerdaels, Engineering Manager, Inktomi Corp.
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FYI, for anyone who missed the article, here's the text:
*****

CACHE A RISING WEB STAR...
Inktomi makes a move into UK and European market
by Lee Kimber
from Network Week -- 29 April 1998

Web caching vendors are eyeing up Britain and Europe as the next big markets
for their products as multimedia Web applications threaten access speeds
over the region's limited bandwidth.

Inktomi announced last week that it was to port its Traffic Server cache
software to Digital's Unix on Alpha platforms to satisfy expected demand
from UK users and license Traffic Server for AOL to use worldwide.

The news came two months after the company opened a UK office to spearhead
its move into Europe.

"From a European perspective there are a lot of people running both Digital
and Solaris," said managing director European operations Ed Gordon. "And if
you look at the bandwidth cost relative to the US, it's five to ten times
more scarce and more expensive in Europe so the value is greater."

But UK ISPs said Inktomi was merely one of a number of US vendors targeting
Europe as a prime market for cache servers. Cisco and Network Appliances
were both understood to have increased their sales efforts in Europe.

"Cache vendors seem already very active at the moment but they're finding
we're caching very efficiently because bandwidth is limited," one leading UK
ISP commented.

Gordon said that US vendors thought Europe was ready for more sophisticated
caching products. "There are some early adopters in Europe," said Gordon.
"But people have been using freeware -- products like Squid -- which doesn't
have transparency, or is not dynamic, scalable or offer the performance."

He cited the failure in the UK of ISPs Web proxy servers, which, lacking
transparency, have had to be configured on the user's browser -- a task few
users were prepared to try.
Received on Mon May 04 1998 - 11:05:17 MDT