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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.
This company organized a huge media-related event, and they wanted to have an on-line registration system. Initially they called in a team which developed the system on Windows NT servers, with ASP and SQL Server. They took 3 months and when they finally delivered the system, it simply crashed under the heavy load.
That's when they called us in. This was 2 days prior to the registration day, so we were in a big rush. We, of course, advocated open/free technologies; we suggested Linux, MySQL, apache and perl. They said OK, so we started working. At the same time, the NT team worked on their server, tweaking it to see if they could withstand the load.
30 hours later, and on a server that was about 1/2 the capacity of the NT team's server, our system went on-line. It turns out it, too, crashed under the load. Heh. But while the NT team was busy rebooting their server just once, we installed Linux on 4 additional computers (desk-grade IBM Aptivas) and ended up with a round-robin configuration, with 4 web servers and a backend database server. Our system handled the load so well, that this time the company' firewall crashed and they had to update it.
I still like to use it as an example of how free technologies and tools enabled us to re-engineer 3 months worth of work from the NT team, in about 36 hours.
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"
I'm a UNIX admin, but I just got my MBA, and the following is what I'd be interested in, if I were attending such a seminar.
1) Switching Costs. The cost of using OSS != hardware costs, it's also the time and effort spent moving over to the new system. How much is it going to cost me to switch over from my current platform? Mention ChiliSoft's ASP stuff, the fact that you CAN run front page extensions on apache (not that I'd recommend it, having installed it, and, man, it's a biyatch), and that you can train sysadmins by using an old desktop PC.
2) Recurring Costs. How much can OSS save me, either through being able to effectively ignore the Windows licensing mambo, increased uptime, or decreased administration costs. Also somewhat important is that you can run the exact same software on a lesser development box if you want, and the marginal cost of that second box is negligible.
3) What happens when we have a problem that my sysadmin can't solve? This is probably the largest barrier to OSS in the private sector, so I'd suggest you deal with it head on. Of course, I don't really have a good answer for that. I haven't found any CIO level person willing to bet their livelihood on "well, there's a really active newsgroup" type arguments. You might also point out that training is available for Linux at comparable cost to NT, so that's pretty much a wash. You might also mention the virtual worthlessness of the MCSE as a gauge for finding a valued sysadmin.
4) Can the company find staff? Finding UNIX geeks isn't simple, finding good ones is downright difficult. I think this has become simpler with the rise of OSS, but it would be a question I'd have if I were a boss. Mention geekfinder, and maybe some other OSS-oriented employment sites.
What I would NOT do is mention that Apache has x% of the web server market. This is contrary to an earlier post, but that Netcraft survey can be invalidated by a quick "yeah, but a bunch of those web sites are academic, or college kids, or hobbyists, and aren't actually used to conduct commerce" comment, which is somewhat valid.
I would also steer clear of uptime and security claims. These guys aren't likely to be on the front lines of keeping those boxes up, and won't appreciate the pain of keeping NT going.
I would mention the cost savings of OSS not as an initial cost, but as an ongoing cost, basically because a) these guys probably have a web site going already, so they'll have to switch over, and b) even if they are starting from scratch, they'll have a budget to work with, so while cost is an object, it's not the primary one when approaching the purchasing decision.
I hope it goes well.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
It's easy to point to a survey and make "somewhat valid" objections to the results. Survey numbers are generally not scientific measurements. The right question to ask is, what do these numbers tell you?
In summary, a lot of people need to learn that choosing something other than MSFT on a web server does not put them outside the mainstream.