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Expriences with Open Source Web Technologies?
_ZorKa_ asks: "I have been asked to give a presentation at an up and coming technology expo by my employer about 'Open Source Web Technologies'. Having taught Linux courses and open source web languages at a local college I feel fairly comfortable in speaking on the subject in front of a large crowd. So, instead of giving some of the same old boring open source stories I normally use I thought I would poll the Slashdot audience and see if there is anything of particular interest I should mention during my presentation. Maybe you have a war story to tell, or some advice to give. Anyone have any great stories that I could pass on as to why you *should* use open source web technologies in a business? Anyone have any links to some sound numbers that can back an argument up with. Even if you have reasons why a business shouldn't use open source web technologies I would like to consider those as well. I'm all ears!"
Without getting into whether or not this is a good thing, large businesses want to use what everybody else is using. It is generally assumed that everybody is using Microsoft. You should correct this misconception by citing the netcraft survey.
Please do mention that while the more prevalent free server-side web technologies are scripting languages designed for people with a Unix/C programming background, they aren't the only options. My Beautiful Report Language is easy to pick up for anyone who knows HTML and SQL. The syntax is conceptually similar to HTML/XML, but less verbose and easy to visually distinguish from markup.
i have 2. the first, my department wanted to install web servers onto our many distributed NT servers. our installation group said "no, we dont want to support IIS cuz its buggy" our technical architecture team said "well, cant you just do the same thing with file:// urls? or write some other program to do it? (my answer to that was that i'd just install apache and say that i wrote a server based on industry standards..." i showed my manager that we could easily install Apache win32 and go from there, but he chose to push the IIS issue and finally that got installed.
months later, when we had buttloads of issues with IIS, he came back to me and said that in retrospect it would have been easier to just install apache...
the second story - i was allowed to go ahead and implement Apache Tomcat for a subsequent project, in order to fufill a java based set of core components. it works great, and i even have it hooked into our IIS servers (still have those buggers) and everything works great. the big problem now is that on our 60 person team, theres only 5 people who know java, and management doesnt want to continue with it, even thought our corporate direction seems to be headed towards java!!!
ok, in retrospect these probably arent the right stories to be regaling the populous with, but they're what i got.
one thing that i came across at my company, which is very microsoft flavored (but moving away slowly) is that in terms of stability, the management has become so used to the lack of stability from Microsoft products that they scale up the hardware to adjust - aka making sure they have abundant backup servers that are load balanced or hot swapped in when problems occur.
its quite sad. even the need to bulk up hardware in memory , cpu and disk does not phase them. - one example where we could save millions in licensing and hardware upgrades by moving to a smaller, cheaper, faster linux solution was thrown out without consideration because "well we should use microsoft right?" and my favorite quote "well i'm sure Bill knows what he's doing."
i think in the future i'll counter with "well linus knows what he's doing, and he's much cooler"