Open Source Software in a Windows Environment?

brennan73 asks: "Like many people, I work in a Windows NT/2000 shop that has absolutely resisted bringing *nixes into our environment. Everyone has their reasons - my boss has resisted because it would be more difficult and expensive to find a replacement admin if I leave, since said replacement would need to be able to administer both Windows and *nix boxes, which I can understand. But I'm still curious...has anyone out there replaced major pieces of Microsoft software with open source equivalents in a medium-to-large business environment, while still running on the Windows platform?"

"Like many people in such shops, I've just about had it with IIS's security problems. I'm also highly unimpressed with Microsoft's new licensing schemes. In other words, between security and money concerns, I can see good reasons for businesses to look for alternatives to Microsoft's standard offerings, for apps and utilities if OSes are ruled out by management.

So, I'm thinking of replacing IIS and Office with Apache and StarOffice for Windows, and I'm open to other examples on both servers and the desktop. Why did you switch? How painful was it for both you and the users? Any experiences that anyone could relate, even failed experiments, would be great."

Comments

Cygwin is a *MUST* for any Win32 system..

[cowmix]

I am forced to use W2K for my job. Having Cygwin installed gives me almost a complete *NIX environment (Openssh, Bash, Perl, Python, Postgres, Xfree, etc) that runs seamlessly in a Win32 system. It is completely awesome.

Re:No Win32 Open Source?

[reynaert]

There is little open source software for windows, because authors of open source software do not want to support microsoft.

(I'm assuming you're speaking about GUI programs. The vast majority of command-line programs can easily be recompiled for Windows using DJGPP (for DOS) or Cygwin (for Win32). These environments exists of a POSIX emulation layer and most of the GNU development utilities (gcc, make, bash, etc.))

The fact is that most Unix programmer's don't know how to program for Windows. I mean, if you primarily develop for Unix, you're not going to spend (waste?) time learning something ugly as the MFC.

What about Windows programmers? Well, DOS/Windows doesn't have (and never had) an open source culture. Instead, most programmer's distribute their programs as shareware or freeware. But they would never let you see the code.

In fact, most Windows open source software comes from Unix people who are forces to work on Windows. Just look at the open source programs available on Windows: Apache. PuTTY, an ssh client. Vim has a Windows port (which is able to integrate in Visual Studio). Cygwin which I already have mentioned above.

Stereotypes

[Carnage4Life]

There is little open source software for windows, because authors of open source software do not want to support microsoft.

Thanks for stereotyping Open Source software developers. Unfortunately you are wrong. Many people who become involved in Open Source software do so because they want to share software with people and not because Micro$oft sux0rs. Simply because most of the posts on Slashdot typically mindlessly bash Microsoft and call it the Great Satan doesn't mean that people developing software that they want to benefit users of software will divorce themselves from the Windows platform.

What makes you think that Open Source development is restricted to users of a certain platform? Open Source Developer != Linux user even though a lot of them are.

Apache and Star Office are exceptions, because they want to become standards and that means being available for the most popular desktop platform.

Exceptions, huh? How about

1. OpenNap
2. XFree86
3. Cygwin
4. Emacs
5. Vi and Vim
6. Mojo Nation
7. Visual Tcl
8. MikTEX
9. Open Perl IDE
10. Mozilla
11. WinCVS
12. BitchX
13. Firebird
14. mySQL

FUD?

[crisco]

While many points you make might be true, they may be due to programmer incompetence as much as the Microsoft platform.

I deal daily with a nontrivial program coded directly to the windows API (no MFC or anything of the sort). It runs across several flavors of Windows (98, ME, 2000) though being developed on 98 and never targetted to 2000. Additionally, it was developed without MS tools using an open source (though not Free) compiler.

Traditionally UNIX utils on Win32

[LetterJ]

Here are just a few of the tools that are considered traditionally in UNIX/Linux/BSD territory that are available for Win32. In all actuality, there's enough out there to get as much of Linux running on Win32 as Win32 running under WINE.
XFree86: http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/xfree/
KDE: http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
GTK/PHP/Libglade: http://gtk.php.net/download.php

Apache: http://www.apache.org
PHP: http://www.php.net
PHPTriad: http://www.phpgeek.com
Perl: http://www.activestate.com
Ruby: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ruby/downloads/ ruby-install.html
Python: http://www.python.org/download/download_windows.ht ml
TCL/TK: http://www.pconline.com/%7Eerc/tclwin.htm

MySQL: http://www.mysql.com
MySQL ODBC: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-myodbc.html
PostgreSQL: Included in cygwin (only works on NT)

ATT's U/WIN* Unix for Windows: http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/
Cygwin: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/
DJGPP: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/
Native UNIX command-line binaries: http://www.wzw.tu-muenchen.de/~syring/win32/UnxUti ls.html

vi: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tmgil/vi.html
Emacs: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs .html
OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org

Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org
GIMP: http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/

List of GNU software for Windows: http://www.gnusoftware.com/
And so on . . .

There's a list over at DMOZ.org of a lot of this.

Re:HP discontinuing OpenMail

[maggard]

HP's already addressed the Open Sourcing of OpenMail when they announced it's EOLing (as championed by then new-hire Bruce Parens.) Apparently there's too much 3rd party licensed code in OpenMail, it would cost large sums of money to sanitize and they felt that without this hard-to-replace code the whole deal would be worthless.

In short it would cost HP lots to give away something unusable and likely not worth fixing up.

Re:OpenSource co-existing with Microsoft

[scrytch]

You are limited to 5 connections I believe. Re- read the license lest you get inot trouble

You're limited to five concurrent "tasks" (queries, inserts, updates, etc), after which it starts serializing them. This is usually quite adequate for development and workgroup-scale serving.

My problem with MSDE is that I can't seem to get it to recognize the existence of its users. I can create users, give them ownership of databases, but the moment I try to use GRANT, it claims there's no such user...