It's been 4 months today since I came to Bangalore. I decided to write about open source tools that we use in our office to show people how much corporates rely upon open source for their businesses.
1. Development: RSA uses Eclipse for java and gcc for C++. Eclipse is open source and is a very good IDE and we all know about gcc. along with these are numerous open source plugins.
2. Management: We use a mix of openLDAP and active directory to manage people
3. Everybody uses firefox
4. RHEL is popular :)
5. Many products have their own wiki's
6. squid
7. tomcat for web-services
8. apache for hosting
I think thatsa lot of things used! Who-ever said open source doesn't work at the enterprise level ?
That said, that the open-source stuff listed above is some of the finest ever built. These softwares come with ultra-cool documentation and optional paid support. I think enterprises look for support and reliability. They don't then care if it's open source or commercial. Thats a major reason they go for a lotta M$ stuff even though it's not much better then open-source. Plus it's only now that open source products are starting to become compatible with each other, an area where M$ is way ahead.
7 comments:
I think thatsa lot of things used! Who-ever said open source doesn't work at the enterprise level ?
i wonder whether you have started realizing things or now you are feeling comfortable to admin them. i see worlds busiest sites running totally on open source ( e.g. wikipedia, slashdot). they are not enterprises but i think their load and security concerns are way beyond an enterprise can expect :)
in above comment its "comfortable to admit them" instead of "comfortable to admin them".
i dont like open source, never liked it.
open source distributes our potential for free (if u see it this way) which is preposterous for us financially.
I know that open source drives the progress fast but that is much less concern than that it reduces us engineer's importance.
I bet if open source didnt exist, our pay packages in companies might hav been much better :)
I don't exactly like or dislike open source. Things like firefox, filezilla are quite good. What I hate is the prejudice in opem source enthusiasts. They hate other softwares especially Microsoft very much. Many think that only open source shud be allowed.
This according to my opinion is not correct. If MicroSoft doesn't want to make Windows open source ( as suggested by one of my class mates) , its his choice, isn't it?
This in no sense implies that such software are evil. We shud judge fairly all the options available to us, not by whether they have this open source tag attached to them.
@shiben... agree that open source decreases our salary...but we can sacrifice this "for the greater good" , can't we ? :P
What you saw isn't the complete picture. Enterprise domain is far more demanding. Open Source is trying to catch up but there is a lot to achieve. If open-source is sufficient then why do enterprises purchase high performance servers from biggies like HP,Sun,IBM,Dell... Why dont they use Ubuntu Gutsy to host their clusters?
...Because there is still long way to go.
@ Raghu
What I meant to convey through this post is that contrary to popular belief the industry does use some open source products in their work!
When it comes to specialised servers people don't use open source primarily because of the lack of hardware vendor supprt. IBM supports some flavours of linux and there is considerable usage of such systems! Maybe vendors in coming years will have better support for open source software.
BTW im not a open source enthusiast. I rather like my windows machine and DirectX :)
@shiben....
Opensource does NOT mean free. It just means that you give out the source code for the solution you created. Its just your way of telling the world that you dont have any back doors into the solution. You still can charge money for development. OpenSource just means that more people look at your code, so you have more code reviews for free :).
Biggies like YAHOO and Google have released a lotta open source, and it has only increased the adoption of users, and hence money.
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