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Cost-Conscious Companies Turn To Open Source
Martyr4BK writes "BusinessWeek has a slew of special reports today on open source software discussing the benefits for buyers who are cost conscious and open source being the silver lining for the economic slump. They even have a slideshow of 'OSS alternatives' like Linux, Apache, MySQL, Firefox, Xen, Pentaho, OpenOffice.org, Drupal, Alfresco, SugarCRM, and Asterisk. These are all good examples (we use a bunch of them already); what other open source software can I use to drop my company's IT costs, and maybe get a decent bonus for the year?"
Do they mention anything about project management? Even on linux, the free stuff I've found can't compete with the uber-expensive proprietary stuff. Am I just looking in the wrong places?
Would love to save $$$ with OSS, but the software I need (robust, full-featured POS system) is non-existent. Bummer.
I don't respond to AC's.
Why not use Vista?...people seem very keen to off-load it...there must be loads going for free!
Smivs on the intertubes!
I've implemented Dansguardian webfiltering with a squid proxy on an unused Mac OS X server to placate my bosses need to control everyone's surfing habit and keep the cost of doing so at $0.
It's not to much that they're opting for free, it's just easier to download and install something that's free to use than to go through the corporate bureaucracy of requesting a software license. I've been waiting 3 months for Dreamweaver (we migrated to Macs and no one thought to think that the licenses weren't transferable from PC's...) and had to find free alternatives to get some damn work done.
Besides Slashdot how much FOSS does Slashdot use?
Do they use Asterisk for it's phone system? Or does it's parent company do all the "business" stuff for them and just let write perl and post articles?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I used to think the TCO argument was rubbish. But then I did some research this year on bug tracking software for my company. At least in this one area, it was obvious that while you'd save a few hundred initially on open source solutions, these solutions were much less polished and supported than their commercial competitors. I would have had to do a lot of additional installations and customization to get things working right. And there was no quick answer from a tech support email address when I would have trouble. And in another recent purchase of music production software, the open source versions were an absolute joke in comparison to commercial varieties. Open source is great. I use Firefox and Open Office all the time. But for business and specialty applications, commercial applications are still often much more solid and cheaper in the long run.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
And what about the _total_ cost of ownership?
I'm all for open source software, don't get me wrong, but switching from a known solution that Works For You(tm) even though it's horribly expensive to a $0 one but with a steep learning curve can be disastrous.
Would you replace Oracle with PostgreSQL if "all" you had in house were Oracle gurus?
I know, this is one example, others may not be that extreme. But taking this kind of decision has to be done with some caution.
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This is a race to the bottom. I'm not syaing Open Source is the cause or the problem (it isn't), just a unintended benificiary (at least in mindshare). But the overall trend is bad for everyone.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
So what is MySQL an open-source "alternative" to? It seems to me like it's a very different kind of product from its proprietary "competitors."
Without telling us what non-free applications are currently being used, it's a very difficult question to answer.
If I were starting a business tomorrow, I can't think of a single piece of commercial software I'd standardise on.
Partly because I'm stingy when it comes to software. Partly because I don't want license management to become a headache as the business grows.
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free, as in beer, not stuck to any location, not locked-in, etc. Here are some starters to current state and future directions of making computing really much more free: http://freedomdrive.org
Server side the savings are pretty obvious, especially around maintenance contracts. On the desktop its much harder as you have all the transition and training costs. Looking at things like SugarCRM, rather than Salesforce.com, is a grey area as you have to pay for the implementation rather than just renting.
Oh hang on its Slashdot and we aren't going to worry about the actual business change, implementation or management side of it, we just want to see two list prices compared and be able to go "OSS is free".
The crunch will help OSS, especially as a CapEx reduction strategy. That is the sales pitch even if it increases the OpEx as right now Cash is king. If you can build a case that does OpEx and CapEx then you are completely sorted.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Ever since I started using Nagios, I've been able to slowly help the rest of the IT department consider open source when starting projects. Now we use Nagios, Backuppc, MySQL, Perl, Splunk, Snare and Ubuntu LTS for servers. The clincher was not having to pay for licensing for a SQL server, OS and all. We're all so tired of dealing with the behemoth of a licensing scheme that Microsoft uses, and that's really what pushed us to alternatives.
in contrast to all those companies out there with a policy of spending as much as possible.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
How is migration and re-training a cost cutting measure? So, you need to either fire your old IT guys and hire on new ones OR pay for training to have them switch to a new architecture? That's cheaper?
In order for these licenses to even be cheaper we're talking about companies dropping their support contracts altogether and using unsupported IT infrastructures. Any company that plans on "saving money" by switching to an unsupported and "community-developed" system for a commercial infrastructure in order to somehow save money is going to get slapped hard- and it's completely their fault.
The real answer here is that it's got more to do with sociology than with business or software. They're simply switching to free software because it looks good in a PowerPoint presentation and gives them something to do other than get fired.
IT is in a rough situation here, they can just keep their existing legacy infrastructures and just keep on as many IT people as they need to maintain it until the market improves; or they can turn to a hip new bleeding edge linux installation that's unstable, poorly undocumented, and full of unanticipated caveats- IT people won't just keep their jobs, they'll have to hire on an army of new people to keep their servers from detonating in lieu of that missing support contract.
Who needs a vendor that can issue quick security and bug patches to major clients when your job's on the line? With linux, IT is always busy and therefore indispensable!
COMMON SENSE COST CUTTING TIPS: Do not upgrade or migrate your IT infrastructure until the financial situation improves. Linux/F/OSS is mostly supported by angel investors and Sun Microsystems, both of which are in terrible shape due to stock market failure. Migrate to linux when the market is in GOOD shape so that it is being maintained, otherwise Windows Server will be innovating faster. If you are adding just a couple new machines, just spring for a couple extra Windows/Solaris/AIX licenses. Do a cost benefits analysis, this is most definitely cheaper. There's nothing more expensive than changing everything, even when it's free!
ALSO, Your employees WILL need to be re-trained to use Evolution instead of Outlook or Openoffice instead of Microsoft Office-- they only look similar when you start them up. The finer points are very different to a non-technical employee. Openoffice.org 3.0 is similar feature-wise to Microsoft Office 2000 or 2003, so it's better to just skip the upgrade to 2007 and wait out the financial crisis in comfortable productivity.
But it's okay to use unlicensed proprietary software, right? I'm sure Microsoft won't mind; it's not like they have teams of lawyers ready to put you out of business.
depending on what you do, Paint.net is a decent low end alternative. I compare it to the slightly older versions of Paint Shop Pro, but they've supposedly added a lot of functionality in the last few versions, closing the Photoshop functionality gap a bit. It's native to windows, and having tested both GIMP and this, has a much less steep 'getting used to it' curve.
It should worry you that someone called Adolf Hitroll with First Post! actually makes a worrying amount of sense.
This story reminds me of those horrid company newsletters that always headline with similar silver lining type stories about how the company's favoured technology is taking the world by storm, regardless of whether there is a bust, depression, global thermonuclear war or the return of The Old Ones to consume the world.
"Company (NASDAQ:COMP) salesdrone Mr Smith reports that Lord Cthulhu's (NASDAQ: N/A) return has upside. Company RFIDs are being implanted in babbling mad civillians in a fallout shelter miles beneath ruined Washington DC. As other cities are consumed, upto 0.0003% of the population will survive in gibbering insanity for weeks before they starve or asphyxiate and will require an RFID for tracking. Company sales representatives have also been dispatched to visit R'lyeh to discuss possible synergies between the company's other product lines and Lord Cthulhu's takeover of this planet and possibly universe, but have not so far reported back. They did report in via email, but those emails have not so far been deciphered."
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
How many companies make software products? I'm willing to bet the vast majority don't...
And even then, it's often permissible to link against OSS libraries without giving away the source of the program (you may have to distribute the library, which is open anyway).
But speaking of risk assessment, i hope your risk assessment of proprietary software includes the risks of not having a second source, because there is very little proprietary software for which a second source vendor is available if the first one goes bankrupt. And as you've nodoubt seen on the news lately, even the biggest companies can easily go bust.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Exchange and SharePoint are huge money-suckers. There are plenty of open source alternatives, such as Citadel and Kolab and OpenGroupware. Give them a try and get that migration started.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
*Not affiliated, just like the resource.
JSF, RichFaces, Hibernate, MySQL, developed on NetBeans and served by Apache TomCat on CentOS for a state government contract.
We have to train ourselves, but that's half the fun.
The other half will be when we pull the plug on one legacy Oracle database with a per CPU cycle license the state is paying an obscene amount of money for.
What?
> Would you replace Oracle with PostgreSQL if "all" you had in house were Oracle gurus?
Can you afford to do that?
Things change, change is inevitable and then... is it wise not to know something?
Companies which have had the resources to do so and which have ordered someone to learn about open source apps won't be putting all eggs in the same basket. It's funny if you everyone on the same boat and the trip is uneventful.
Not so funny when a storm approaches.
Can any company really afford to adopt a single solution, be it onerous or inexpensive?
Even if you like best one office suite, it's better to have both. Even moreso if one of them is free as in beer.
Planner wasted a day of my life last week. I put an entire project into it, and then found out it couldn't do leveling. It also couldn't export in MS Project or any other common format, so I had to start again in another project management tool. Eventually I just went with a table in a wordprocessor, and a collaboration webapp.
Obviously, you've never worked for a corporation using commercial software. Try emailing, for instance, Oracle's tech support. At one time, it took me *two months* to get the response I needed from Oracle. Or rather, a response that *didn't* solve my problem: "that feature has been deprecated since Oracle 8i". It took them two full months just to find that an obscure feature that was essential to my work wasn't supported anymore.
Based on my 25+ years of experience of using software, both commercial and free, today I'd rather have Google and the source code than any paid tech support.
Often over looked in the geek crowd, but critical to any company and often a fairly large expense is how they handle their payroll and time management.
In the past this market has been strictly held by the traditional proprietary software companies, but the open source alternative TimeTrex has broken into this market with a pretty big bang.
Last I heard they were getting over 10,000 downloads a month, and I personally haven't found a single competitor worth mentioning.
Despite being free on one level, if you look at opensource from a business perspective you realize they are looking at the costs slightly differently.
If they are looking at all that is. To be considered by a business, the opensource alternative has to be noticed first, and that isn't trivial considering the vast majority of opensource projects don't exactly have a marketing budget.
One way to lower the barrier to entry is to make an opensource solution really easy to try out, but sometimes even that isn't enough. Often an opensource alternative is noticed, but its not a perfect fit for what the business (thinks it) needs. The free part is less impressive when you have to consider customization costs, integration costs, long-term maintenance costs, etc. Most businesses don't want to have to notice their software, they just want something that works.
Now for the plug. I'm one of the developers for TurnKey Linux, an opensource project that aims to develop high-quality software appliances that are easy to use, easy to deploy, and free. The project's motto is "everything that can be easy, should be easy!"
We've been building a family of installable live CDs that are based on Ubuntu (Debian too soon!) and are each pre-integrated to serve specific usage scenarios (e.g., CMS, database, Wiki, web development frameworks).
We only launched a few months ago, and we're still officially in beta, but thanks to the feedback from the community we've already made pretty good progress (up to 9 appliances now - we're covering the low hanging fruit first)
Technical highlights:
We're hoping this kind of last-mile integration effort will make opensource alternatives an easier "sell" and promote adoption.
Check us out!
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/
TurnKey Linux: everything that can be easy, should be easy!
It's a tool. Buy it yourself and take a personal tax deduction. I worked construction a lot, the various companies didn't provide ALL the tools, you needed a robust selection to bring to the job with you, not just show up empty handed. Why should using computer tools be any different, it is a well paid business. I worked logging before, you bought all your own chainsaws (you always went into the woods with several), the company provided a truck and skidder. Once I had a white collar job in sales, it was well paid if you produced (100% commissions). I didn't get a company vehicle, I provided my own, at my own expense and maintenance and gas and insurance, etc and took a mileage deduction on taxes, which worked out pretty good actually because I got a cheap but still in good shape used car for all my driving (around 200 miles per day). Drop the cash if that is the tool you really NEED to do your job. Now I don't know for a fact, but I would bet you being in a design job where you need dreamweaver you make enough money to afford a copy, and just get with your accountant or tax preparation software to see how to make it cost effective with your tax burden. Most likely it will be free/paid for within a year or two, and much quicker if you actually use that tool to be more productive.
That's weird. Here in Brazil, most POS solutions (that's "Point of Sale," not "Piece of $#!+") are Windows-based, but I found a few Linux-based solutions, of which some were Free Software and some were proprietary. The best one, called Stoq, does everything I want, and it's real Free Software, so if I want to have it modified or customized, I can get the source code and adapt it myself or pay somebody to do it, or I can hire the company that makes Stoq to make the modifications for me. If they find the modifications interesting enough to add to the product in general, I might not even get charged for the alterations.
One thing that's nice about Stoq is that as of the next version, which is due in January, I will have functionality that most of the proprietary solutions don't offer. It has to do with credit and debit card transactions. There are two ways to do that here. One is called, confusingly enough, POS (but to be fair, I should mention that Point of Sale is usually expressed in Portuguese - Ponto de Venda and is therefore usually abbreviated PdV or PDV). Under POS, the store owner has to rent separate machines for each major credit card brand (VISA and Mastercard are the two main brands, with a few others available). Under the other standard, TEF (from the abbreviation of "electronic funds transfer" in the Portuguese word order), the store has to have a single pinpad with a card reader, which is then used for transactions involving any kind of card.
TEF can be done a couple of different ways. For retailers with ten or more points of sale, it's worthwhile to have "Dedicated TEF," with a server that provides the communication between the points of sale and, via a dedicated X.25 connection, the credit card providers. For smaller retailers, a dedicated TEF solution is not worth what it costs. Smaller retailers wanting to use TEF have, until recently, been restricted to "dial-up TEF," and further, because of the fact that the only company approved to supply TEF dialers is a Microsoft partner, there were no non-Windows TEF dialers, so smaller retailers were restricted to Windows-based solutions in order to be able to use TEF.
It is ridiculous to have to use a dial-up solution in 2008, especially in places like Sao Paulo. TEF over IP exists, but there are still relatively few solutions in the market. Stoq will have TEF over IP available starting in January, just as free-as-in-beer AND free-as-in-speech as the rest of Stoq. The retailer will still need to pay the providers for the service, but the monthly cost to be able to provide transactions using all the card providers available in Brazil on a TEF over IP solution is less than the cost of renting a single card machine from a single card provider for a POS solution.
Anyway, given that there are good Free Software POS solutions available in Brazil, I would imagine such things are also available in the USA. "Non-existent" is a pretty strong claim.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Here's the rub: pay for the proprietary software and get service, deployment, and customization with varying degrees of quality. Or get open source projects that require customization and put the burden on your IT staff to make it happen. Some of those are no-brainers but some of the more specialized enterprise stuff gets REALLY hairy. With deadlines, migrations, and trouble-shooting, the company might spend just as much money on over-time and lost productivity or, worse, the salaried IT staffers will suffer under the extra work-load. Hiring contractors, training, and all of those other things add up, too. These details make the business decisions more complicated when you're trying to justify the pain of migration with lowered costs.
I know this will be a very unpopular comment here, but I think open source and GNU software are awesome but they're not always the right solution to every problem.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Sorry for the bluntness, but... holy crap! not The Gimp Thread Again. It boils down to:
1) Gimp is nice
2) Gimp gets better with time
3) Gimp's interface is horrible
4) Gimp's interface gets better with time
5) Gimp doesn't have CMYK support
6) This is not important to a whole lotta people
7) But it is a show stopper for some
8) iterate until hell freezes over
There, one less gimp thread!
-- dnl
We are supposedly an open source shop and productivity is severely hampered by the constant maintenance required.
If that's the case then you've implemented OSS badly. We're 90% Linux here and the last significant downtime we recorded was when the remnants of Hurricane Ike blew through town and knocked out the power across the whole area. We use OSS solutions precisely because we don't have to jack with them all the time. The last place I worked that was constantly tweaking and fixing things was an all Microsoft shop.
Over half the company just use their own personal laptops due to the hassle, which ironically, defeats the crippling obsession with security that the IT guys have.
See, that sounds fishy to me. The only people still using Windows here are the sales reps. There's a Windows kiosk in accounting for a couple Windows-only apps they need and one in the flex area for anyone who might need a Windows client, but that goes largely unused. Other than that, no one is using their home laptops here. We use corporate Gmail which has some quirks but is generally quite reliable and no one has once complained about missing Outlook. Many were already using Gmail to manage their office email anyway. Lot of the staff use GoogleApps to collaborate on docs, we use Gliffy quite a bit and our Blackberry's.
There are generally two areas that make transition challenging: Productivity and specialty apps like GoToMyPc, which doesn't support Linux. On the productivity side, linked spreadsheets and Access db's are what give you fits. The specialty apps are why we keep a Windows box in the flex area. But that hasn't hurt our productivity any. I'd put our application turn-around times against any Windows shop and we do it with less staff. We save a LOT of money in license costs. Very real savings that we put to very good use.
Either your IT shop is phenomenally poorly run or that story's a big, fat fib.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'm working on an IPAM tool that might be useful to people. It's still got a bit of work to go but its better than a spreadsheet! Have a look at http://opennetadmin.com/
When we started development of our software, we noticed that everyone else in our business were all depolyed on Windows. When we were doing research on our main competitor in this region, it was pretty clear why they were Windows based, all of the company's founders had worked for Microsoft or were certified MS techs.
From the outset we were going to be using *iux based servers with PHP & PostgreSQL and JAVA for desktop apps. OpenBravo powers our ERP and POS systems.
Originally I pushed for FreeBSD, but we went OpenSuSE for no other reason that it was the first distro to work out of the box with all drivers with our development machine. So when it came time to go live, our servers were running OpenSuSE on the web and application servers and FreeBSD to power the Database Server.
Our Jr. Coders & Contract employees all currently use OpenSuSE based desktops with Eclipse, OpenOffice, and/or Google Docs for internal communications. Right now we're spending about $95 per developer in software costs. And that is for a single Windows box that people can remote into to test or use a rapid development CRUD program that is windows only.
When were looking at our main competitor in the geographic region, we figured we could hire at least one, possibly two full time developers for what they spend on software licenses alone. (They use MSSQL and roll their own database servers in house.) Now they may have a bit more scalability built in. But our plans was to use PostgreSQL until it reaches the point where we need a true enterprise class database. Then we call Teradata and be done with it. But that is likely going to be a coupe years until we reach that point.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Come on, with so many networkable games around this is not a question that will arise :-).
However, it assumes you like the Citadel model. I'm not so happy with it, but that's personal taste - I am certainly impressed by its ability to interact with other Citadel servers.
Insert
I would think another problem might be that if you opt for a commercial solution you have no guarantee that the company and its software will continue to exist in the future. With FOSS the author(s) might stop writing it and companies that support it might come and go, but you always have the option of hiring a developer to expand and improve it if you wish to do so. With commercial software your only choice is to continue to use a deteriorating product, or switch to something else.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
At this very moment in time there is nothing I can pull in from the Net which I can run for a while as Exchange replacement without a large amount of work on the client side - MS has built the barriers quite well.
As long as there isn't a USABLE Exchange replacement we won't be able to lose it in the server room - management is addicted to Outlook (even though the 2007 version suffers the same productivity obliterating GUI) and its ability to share calendars. And AFAIK there is NO plug-n-play replacement out there.
Next up: Outlook. Without an API compliant replacement that integrated what Outlook put together you've got no hope. Mobile phones sync to it (including the Jesus phone), calendaring is integrated and there is over the air sync available as well. And it sucks VERY badly on networking (which you find when you make the mistake to use it on EDGE or 3G) - but it works for management. End of story.
I would LOVE to nuke the Exchange setup and move that last bastion to Ubuntu as well, but no chance..
Insert
This is a good example of an itch that needs to be scratched (for a fee). If people are trying to get into Open Source to save money, and all they are lacking is support, crunch some numbers about how much typical businesses would save by eliminating the cost of their proprietary software. Charge that much for support and if you can stay in business:profit.
It isn't conceptually difficult, it is just a matter of getting the right numbers to work out for your consultancy. If there was a one stop shop that was easy and could save a business money, many would make the switch.
gcc as your compiler. The visual GUI's for various Microsoft compilers are pretty, but tend to produce crap code.
GNU-make for building software. Again, the GUI's for software builders are pretty, but tend to reproduce problems solved in GNU make 10 years ago.
CygWin for Windows SSH and X software. It costs some support, but is much lighterweight, more powerful, and more flexible than the commercial X servers.
Bugzilla for ticketing. The idea in commercial systems of 'internal notes' that the bug submitter cannot see is anathema to good support, and the focus on pretty charts of garbage like Siebel is a waste of everyone's time. And the amazingly stupid proprietary clients for many commercial ticket systems, coupled with the Oracle databases, are huge moneysinks and support time abusers.
Amanda for backup. There are plenty of expensive backup systems with lots of features, but most of them are unnecessary in the real world. Zmanda now provides commercial support.
Xen for virtualization. The situations that Xen cannot handle instead of VMware are very few, and usually the result of someone doing something very foolish, and Xensource for commercial support is quite affordable.
CFengine for network wide management. The tiime spent learning it is time spent otherwise adapting commercial tools to accomplish the same site specific sites.
Apache for web servers. It's very powerful, very flexible, and actually follows the specifications as compared to IIS and many commercial web servers.
We were traditionally a windows company. However, the number of linux boxes is growing rapidly in engineering. I have a windows box, a linux box, and a dual-boot laptop. I can do most everything on my linux box, the windows box is mostly for using Outlook (we run Exchange) and having an environment common to the one engineers on windows machines have. The laptop is for small scale experiments. All in all its a great setup for me.
The cost of a bad decision is amortized over the life of the system. It is easier for a business to accept a low initial cost in exchange for paying a much greater total cost over the life of the product than it is for them to accept a large initial cost with much greater long term savings.
This is why Windows is so successful. Consumers browsing Best Buy don't see the annual reinstall or inevitable virus-cleanup. They see a product which is easy to use from the outset, and can play their video and audio with minimal hassle. I've actually met people who would rather buy another PC when their machine slows down than deal with the inconvenience of rebuilding their Windows system, or installing and learning Linux.
In business, a similar law applies: A decision which results in immediate savings earns the manager kudos, where one which results in immediate loss is discouraged. There are multiple reasons for this:
Open source has already become ubiquitous in companies still in the black. Now that the economy is in the toilet, those companies that have reduced their IT cost through using open source solutions are better able to compete with those that did not. You have two types of management culture:
Open source is for companies that want to be successful, regardless of market conditions. It does take a considerably greater up front investment, but results in the company working better as a whole. Companies which track the cost of every bean probably won't benefit from open source because of the difficulty in quantifying the savings; they'll never adopt it in the first place. But ultimately, success in business is not about accounting methods, but revenue generation and cost elimination. Consequently, one of the best indicators of a good employer is their use of open source... if they don't use it, it could be indicative that their management is incapable of sound long term decisions.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
If your company requires helpdesk/ticket tracking software, I would recommend a French project called GLPI. It's basically just a php-based site that runs on any linux/apache/mysql server.
<gir voice> I love this sig... </gir voice>
Switch your company to GNUCash. Of course, you will need to know something about bookkeeping and accounting to hide your bonus in there like the C*Oes do.
(What? You didn't think you'd get anything more than a Jelly-of-the-Month club subscription for saving the company millions, did you?)
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
More worrying, to me, is that the post, which makes sense, is modded "Offtopic," and furthermore, that this was predictable.
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Alfresco is not open source. it is not registered with OpenSource.org. it does not comply with the classifications of being open source (http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php). And I really hate to see people misled into thinking that Alfresco is open source.
if you're talking about the community edition, yeah, its open source for the most part. The bad part is that the community edition has no guarantee, nor solid history of being stable.
If you're talking Enterprise level, which is a totally different code base, the source is held captive by a $15K ransom.
Alfresco should not be considered open source, and should not be referenced as such. If they want talk the OSS talk, then Alfresco needs to start walking the OSS walk.
I use OpenProj http://openproj.org/openproj
I'm typing this on a Linux box. It works just fine. It's a powerful development platform and I've developed all sorts of cool stuff on it.
We make extensive use of Apache, MySQL, and related goodies. One of my recent applications was my first foray in to Django. It too works just fine.
Now we're looking at VoIP, based on Asterisk. I downloaded the current source tarball, built it, am using the O"Reilly Asterisk book to figure out how it works. It works. I just phoned a test extension and left voicemail. Great. What is not great is trying to get any hardware to use with it. Nobody in town has VoIP anything, except for Vonage boxes (ugh). I ordered a SIP phone to play with from some clowns on the internet who never bothered telling me that it was back-ordered/discontinued (they seem unable to decide themselves) until I phoned them today (2 weeks later) wondering where the hell my phone was.
This is starting to raise a flag. The software is fine, but if we can't get hardware to play with it, what's the point?
...laura
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I have created a spreadsheet (on Google Docs) with a list of categories and started to share it with friends. If you like, post your gmail address (highly recommend you do it in this format emailID[at]gmail.com to avoid spam), and I'll be more than happy to give you read-only access.
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You forgot:
9) Gimp has a stupid name
10) Tough shit, that's the name the developers picked.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Companies could save a lot with programs like Scalix.
It will replace Exchange Server, and that is one of the
last bastions of MS cash flow.
If Scalix can surpass Exchange then the MS will take a big hit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalix
Scalix may not kill the MS empire, but that will be a decent chunk.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Thirsty Man Turns To Water.
Naked People Turn To Clothes.
etc.
myselfmusic
Ok, you got the first half of the process ... using open source tools and libraries to build new applications and services.
Sounds like an interesting project to work on, lots of interesting links to the things you are using.
;-)
The next step is to make your code open source so the rest of us can learn from your experience and use your code to build even bigger and better systems
Pentaho's code is funny. Check the 158 undocumented classes all called "Messages". http://javadoc.pentaho.com/kettle/index.html Or references in the code to previous clients. And the sheer amount of constructor of some classes (most of them of type String). Or classes (lots) with 6,000 lines (check TransMeta.java). My brain rots with the stupid amount of code they use to do some things. And remove System.outs already wtf!
However, it works.
I save easy $250,000 US a year being an all open source shop, and would likely not even be in buisness without open source software in a small company of less than 10 employees that is not primarily IT related but uses a lot of software to reduce cost.
For those that complain that they did better under Microsoft, chances are has no idea what their IT staff was doing when they ran MS.
Living in Chile
dotProject ... and web2project are 2 possibilities. There are others. Freshmeat.net is your friend.
If I were starting a business tomorrow, I can't think of a single piece of commercial software I'd standardise on.
Partly because I'm stingy when it comes to software. Partly because I don't want license management to become a headache as the business grows.
/.'s very own Roblimo gives another very good reason in this article: Why proprietary software is dangerous for business-critical applications
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Using GIMP in place of Photoshop to cut costs is one thing. Also, a good alternative to JAWS is needed for Blind users. The screen reading software is $900, the company Freedom Scientific is charging such a high price because they know people will go to their state's Rehabilitation department for help getting the software. Because they have a monopoly on such products they can do as they please, but the OSS community could change all that.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Even in a recession some companies build custom in-house applications for legitimate reasons(eg drug development pipelines at life sciences companies, which I'm currently working on).
For custom web apps, especially apps that need to provide desktop-like functionality in a browser, you should consider SmartGWT.
Google Code project:
http://code.google.com/p/smartgwt/
SmartGWT is:
1) LGPL, so free for use inside closed-source, commercial applications
2) Ajax-based, so you're not buying into a proprietary platform like Silverlight or Flex
3) based on Google Web Toolkit, so you write your applications in Java in a model similar to Java Swing. You can use your existing skills and existing people instead of trying to hire Flex or Ajax experts, who are hard to find even in this recession
4) really suited to enterprise apps, eg, it's not just pretty widgets that leave all the data handling up to you. The concept of CRUD operations on data is deeply built into it the framework, so master-detail, many-to-many assignment, and similar recurring interactions from enterprise applications are really easy:
http://www.jroller.com/sjivan/entry/smartgwt_1_0_released
5) commercially supported (by Isomorphic Software) if you need a throat to choke, or want the enterprise version some day (additional tools, pre-built Hibernate integration, etc)
Demos:
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/
You are right. This part always get into The Gimp Thread too!
-- dnl
By keeping source code a secret, companies like Microsoft, hold back computer science, if when windows95 was put on the market the source code had been published as well, thousands and thousands of coders from all over the world would have been able to work on it, adding features and removing bugs. People will wave their hands about and cry how will these coders get paid? Simple - they could have been paid in just the same way as any other public servant or military personnel or teacher is paid.
The more that companies support and use open source, the more everybody benefits. Why do you think Google have made Android open source? It is so every one can benefit. Making the source code for an operating system closed source, is a narrow minded and antisocial form of selfishness.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Grin, I have had an active Zimbra machine for well over a year, and I'm just moving all the data over to a commercial Zimbra provider because it's both cheaper and safer (the lot I work with operates under both data protection and bank secrecy in a country where these terms still mean something). And I have had that box run Citadel for a while as well to test. And I've used OpenExchange for over 2 years..
The problem I have is the golf course effect. You have a couple of high level people who take design decisions that they should not take, but you are powerless to argue. When your new setup non-Exchange is being tuned, every hiccup is a disaster and proof that the "old system was better" and people are tasked to deploy Exchange. The fact that a mobile Exchange - Outlook link sucks seven road to Paris, that the server needs a lot of work and that the whole assembly costs bags more money is ignored.
Microsoft KNOWS decisions are not made on technical merit but on perception, why do you think they blow so much money on marketing? Vista shows you must really screw up badly before you break that approach.
Besides, if decisions were really made on the basis of technical merit I am very uncertain we would be running Windows at all..
Insert
WebGUI is a great open source CMS. On par with MS SharePoint or Oracle Portals, and it's free. http://www.webgui.org
PostPath (http://www.postpath.com/) is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for Exchange - e.g no MAPI connector needed, they reverse-engineered the Exchange protocol.
However, Cisco bought them recently, and unlike most Cisco acquisitions (which continue on nearly unchanged, e.g Linksys), PostPath seems to have been swallowed up. I hear their intent is to turn PostPath into an email-as-a-service product. Thus, not available as an in-house server any longer. Sigh.
Cisco - make PostPath available for in-house (non-SAAS/cloud) servers again!
Would love to save $$$ with OSS, but the software I need (robust, full-featured POS system) is non-existent. Bummer.
I was looking into this in the past and I came across OpenBravo (http://www.openbravo.com). They have two main components: ERP and a POS. They appear to have been designed to integrate.
I've never personally deployed this, but they offer the standard "commercial support for OSS product" model.
From my own light exploration, they appear to be pretty flexible applications. Might be helpful to your business especially if you are looking for front-end/back-end integration between internal business logistics/inventory and the front-line PoS systems.
There are a few caveats, as with any system, but maybe they're worth a look if you're seriously interested. Actually, I'd like to hear how you make out with that as I've been looking into its application elsewhere.
As for almost any kind of implementation, OSS or otherwise, it's important to make sure you've got your business requirements down. Then find a solution that works for your business needs - not the other way around. (But I'm sure everyone here already knows that and doesn't fall for the old 'gadget/feature' trap.... Right? ;) )
Anyhow, I'm rambling now. Let me wrap up:
* OpenBravo's one option, I'm sure there are more.
* It will be rare that an OSS or commercial product will be perfect 'out of the box'. You may need devel work done, but YMMV.
* If you don't want to do/commission any devel to meet your needs, you will likely be disappointed by the OSS world. Most OSS projects I've used are best-effort unless they're commercially backed. It wouldn't be fair to you or the projects to bring unrealistic expectations to the eval table.
* Even though I'm not a devel, I don't think OSS simply exists for others to party w/o sharing some of the cake. If it works, feel free to contribute in some manner. (ie. paid support, code, donations, feedback (not whining), even 'championship'/promotion.)
My company tends to stick with paid support and we will do testimonials where appropriate. I tend to do advocacy (championing/promotion) by recommending what I believe the best tool is for the job, OSS or otherwise. That way people know what to expect and what its limitations are and what recourse they have to get assistance.
* Despite what I've heard about people's understanding of OSS, I don't think the OSS community planned OSS to be "free" as in "free ride." (Not to imply that that this is what you're looking for.)
* OSS is not a magic bullet for saving money. Every solution has a cost and that cost is sometimes not quantifiable in dollars and cents.
* Lastly, I'm not associated w/ OpenBravo or any other OSS/commercial product. Just my 2,3 and 4 bits.
Good luck on your search!