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Best Open Source Alternatives To Enterprise Apps
PeekAB00 writes "With 2009 IT budgets getting chopped down John Perez came up with this list of 25 best alternatives to enterprise applications (e.g DimDim over Webex, SugarCRM instead of Seibel, Zenoss over HP OpenView). John's list is somewhat eclectic. I am curious to hear what other enterprise (let's be frank ... expensive) apps I can replace this year with open source ones. I am particularly interested in back-up and email archiving suggestions."
Whatever you've got, consider replacing it with Sphinx, which is awesome. I'm using it with Rails and the Ultrasphinx plugin and it's been great - doing excerpts (for example, notice the highlighted results from a search for 'combat') - was a piece of cake.
The Army reading list
We are migrating a whole bunch of sites away from eRoom because it's so expensive. (I didn't know it was open source, but the guy who brought it into our enterprise is a huge proponent of open source. He has rapidly lost interest in it over the past 12 months, mainly because it was a headache to administer and an embarrassment in a business sense because of the costs.)
Open source or not, I don't particularly care; I'm interested in doing the best thing for the business. In this case, eRoom is so expensive as to be unjustifiable, and we're realizing substantial cost savings by migrating to a closed source solution.
Bottom line: eRoom may (or may not) be a good technical solution, but I'm amused by seeing it in an article about using open source alternatives to save money.
Interesting. Tell that to Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, Nokia and YouTube. Or, how about Slashdot and Digg - capable of bringing down moderately sized web sites with the click of a million mice?
Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL
http://www.mysql.com/customers/customer.php?id=281
http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/generate-article.php?type=ss&id=slashdot
Just as a single example, what kind of scalability do most people need beyond Facebook and Wikipedia. I work for a very large internet company that has standardized on Oracle, and we have several well-paid DBAs who spend all day monitoring and tweaking our database servers. My previous job was a different large company that used MySQL as a back end for a very similar infrastructure (Java EE, Spring, Hibernate, Clustered in a similar way) with not a single full-time DBA (the helpdesk manager was the only real DBA other than the deployment engineers).
Now, I'm not a professional DBA. I'm just a programmer, but I was one of the maintainers of the MySQL server (I don't get to touch the Oracle servers here except on my local developers instance). I can tell you from personal experience that MySQL is easier to maintain and administer, faster to start up, and requires far fewer system resources to keep going. Judging by just the performance of Wikipedia and Facebook, it seems to perform quite well under heavy load. So, please tell me what basis you have to place MySQL out of the elite top-tier of database servers?
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