Network World is reporting that 2010 will be the year of Open Source. According to the article, half of the organizations surveyed are using Open Source Software in some capacity already, and the vast majority (71% in the US) said they are planning to greatly increase their use of OSS in the coming year.
More interestingly, perhaps, many of the participants in the survey reported that they are switching to OSS for non-financial reasons such as:
- Better security/bug fixing
- Faster time to development
- Improved reliability
- Easier to maintain the software
- Better match of software to organizational/business needs
- Auditability of the software
- Better quality software than proprietary systems
At AppliedTrust we have experience with a wide range of Open Source Software. Many of the servers we support are running on the Linux kernel, many of the webservers are running Apache, PHP, and MySQL. We use Cacti and Nagios for monitoring, and Mantis, PMWiki, and MediaWiki for tracking bugs and technical issues. It makes sense that at a time when companies are looking to cut costs and conserve money, many would look to enhancing their use of free and Open Source products. I firmly believe that Open Source makes sense, not only from a financial perspective, but also because of the power and flexibility it gives you over your IT destiny. When a client wants to add a piece of functionality to Mantis, not only is that a straightforward task, but they know that it will be easy to find programmers that can do the work.
I think we should all remember, however, that OSS is not a panacea. For instance, Linux web servers usually provide great return on investment, but it's important to integrate them properly into your environment. If you use Active Directory to authenticate your Windows hosts, set up your PAM modules to authenticate against AD on your Linux hosts as well. MySQL is easy to set up and maintain, but it's important to remember to secure it properly by creating accounts and restricting access appropriately. Staying abreast of vulnerability announcements and installing security updates is just as important as it is with proprietary software. Luckily, administration in the Open Source world isn't any harder than in the proprietary world - it's just different. And if you need a few pointers, there are some great resources available (warning, shameless plug!) such as the Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook, 4th Edition.
In any event, it's an exciting time to be in the IT industry, and it's especially exciting as a consultant to be able to point out such a wide variety of choices to our clients. The number of solutions to any given problem seems to multiply with each passing month, and that can be no bad thing.