iPlanet

» see iplanet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

iplanet was never something you could sign up for. it was a line item on a corporate purchase order, and the only way most people ever met the name was sideways, in a server header or in a directory of configuration files somebody else had written years earlier.

it exists because of what aol did not want. when aol finished buying netscape in march 1999, analysts read the deal as being about netscape.com and the millions of registered users attached to it. the enterprise server business was the part aol had no obvious use for, so aol did not keep it. it went to sun microsystems under a three year arrangement called the sun|netscape alliance, where engineers from both companies worked on the same products and sun paid netscape a fixed amount every year whether or not anything sold.

the name came from somewhere else entirely. sun had bought a company called i-planet, inc. in october 1998, a startup barely two years old, and the brand was sitting unused when the alliance needed one. the marketing campaign launched on 21 july 1999. the logo carried the line "a sun|netscape alliance" underneath it, which is an unusual thing to print on a product: an admission, in the wordmark, that this is a temporary arrangement between two other companies.

in 2002 i was on a dial-up line at home in turkey, and software reached me either down that line or on a disc that got passed around. enterprise server brands were a different internet, the one that got sold in meetings rather than downloaded. i met iplanet years later and in the past tense, the way you meet most of them, as a string sitting in a configuration file on a machine nobody had rebuilt.

~ the case file ~

~ what the alliance actually was ~

on paper it was a partnership. in practice it was an orderly transfer with a three year clock on it. netscape hired almost nobody during the period and most of the people doing the work came in under the sun umbrella, so by the end there was not much of a netscape side left to dissolve.

the products were the serious part of netscape that nobody remembers, because everyone remembers the browser. web server, directory server, messaging server, calendar server, plus a whole ecommerce suite with names like buyerxpert and sellerxpert that read now like a parody of 1999. the directory server is the one that mattered and it is the only one still running anywhere today.

~ the day it died ~

the alliance expired in 2001. under the terms, aol and sun each walked away with equal rights to everything the two sides had built together, which meant both of them owned the same code and neither owed the other anything. toward the end of august 2001 the remaining netscape employees were laid off or moved onto sun payroll at santa clara and bangalore. on 5 october cnet reported that sun was absorbing what was left of iplanet's staff and functions.

the brand outlasted the partnership by six months and then went too. on 15 april 2002 sun announced sun one, short for sun open net environment, and pulled iplanet under it alongside staroffice. the wordmark that said "a sun|netscape alliance" was now describing something that had not existed for a year.

~ the inheritance ~

the pieces scattered and most of them landed somewhere. in 2004 aol sold the directory and certificate servers to red hat, which open sourced both, and they are still shipping as red hat directory server. sun one itself was superseded on 16 september 2003 by the sun java system brand, so the products got renamed twice inside eighteen months by a company that clearly had no idea what to call them.

then the strangest part. oracle bought sun in 2010 and brought the dead name back, selling oracle iplanet web server and oracle iplanet web proxy server to customers who could not be moved off them. premier support for that line ended in march 2017 and extended support ran out in march 2018. iplanet.com does not resolve at all now, which for a brand that was resurrected once already is a reasonably final answer.

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