Nobody likes to be the first one to do something. Many times in my experience many people pass up open source software simply because it is something that is new, different, and their friends don’t use it. In businesses this seems to be especially true. You run to bestbuy or call up dell and they sell you a stack of stuff. Even the idea of using an alternative is scary.

With that in mind I thought I would point out a couple of great success stories.

First, google. I know that google becomes a poster child for a lot of things but lets look at some facts and figures that can cut the bull of rhetoric. Based upon googles reported fourth quarter figures in 2009: Google reported revenues of $6.67 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2009, an increase of 17% compared to the fourth quarter of 2008. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs (TAC). In the fourth quarter of 2009, TAC totaled $1.72 billion, or 27% of advertising revenues.

Second, Facebook. Now facebook is privately traded and so they are not as forthright with their financial information but according to businessinsider.com: “We’ve heard from a couple reliable sources that when it was looking for its latest funding, Facebook told investors 2009 revenues would reach $550 million.”

Now why do I bring up these companies when talking about open source? They do not offer any open source product, but they are built on open source much like what I propose would be beneficial for your business. For instance, facebook is a heavy user of open source, as stated on their website: “Facebook is the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world, and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere, running thousands of databases. Facebook has built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that allows the company to seamlessly and easily tie together subsystems written in any language, running on any platform. The company is the largest user in the world of memcached, an open-source caching system, and has created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates.”

Google likewise is a huge open source user. As stated on their open source blog: “Google uses a vast amount of open source software from the operating system level on up, and it is our intention to be a good example of how a company of any size can interact with the outside world of open source developers.”

The whole point is that these companies don’t sell open source, but leverage it to build their business and keep overhead down. Could you do something similar in your IT solution? Lets talk about it and find out.

This is a collection of blog posts from my other blog outlining why Linux is enterprise ready.

I was talking to a few of the network guys at SLCC. We all had Mac’s and were talking about that and I said that I used linux. They laughed and said that linux is nice and all if you have time to hack on it, but they had an enterprise to run. We chatted for a minute more but it got me thinking about linux in enterprise.

First, they said that they needed stuff to just work out of the box.
Well, what doesn’t work? Within half an hour I can have a linux server installed with a database server, and web server running. With another half hour I can have DNS, and DHCP going. A little more time and a samba server can be set up serving network shares.

Now I have never set up LDAP or Kerberos, but I’ve heard than it is easier that setting up Active Directory and I have set up AD deployments.

So what does it take to just work? You can’t set up any machine without some sort of configuration. So, if ‘just working’ is to plug it in, and then configure and run, my thought is, what doesn’t ‘just work’ with linux in the enterprise?

Open Source Software is already tried and tested in the enterprise arena. BIND for DNS. LDAP and Kerberos are used for central authorization (these are the technologies under Microsoft’s active directory). Samba for network shares and network printing. Apache runs 50.4% of the web. MySQL database has 40% market share for developers and 33% for deployment. Then there is squid, a popular proxy server and proftpd for an ftp server.

In addition to these software pieces, many appliances run on *nix kernels and utilize various Open Source technologies. SLCC uses a Barracuda spam filter that runs on a linux kernel and uses a combination of proprietary and open source software to filter spam. Likely that this includes SpamAssassin and ClamAV. It also uses LDAP.

So with all these tried and trued open source products why is it that linux is not ready for the enterprise market?

Linux in the enterprise may have one big hold back, a lack of qualified professionals. James, the network admin at SLCC, brought up the point that even if you do get Open Source software up and running in your enterprise the guy that actually sets it up and knows about it leaves and you don’t have an admin any more.

To some this may be a valid point, but I would disagree. Linux has built in documentation with ‘man pages’. Take that coupled with the community knowledge which is shared via forums, wiki’s, and irc channels and there is a wealth of information only a few keystrokes away. If that isn’t enough companies like Guru Labs offer training on just about anything to do with linux administration. Still want more? Specifically someone to point the finger at? Then this is the perfect place for companies such as Red Hat and Novell, which sell their admin services as well as entire enterprise solutions.

Now I have Admined smaller business systems, 50 to 100 users and the guys I was chatting with are dealing with 60,000 users. But really, every enterprise is already using a certain amount of Open Source software. The only excuse that anyone can’t be a linux professional is that they can’t read, type, and they’re lazy.

Now that last statement is harsh. It is pointed, cold, and some could say it is narcissistic. The real point is that the cost of open source software is the investment of time to gain the knowledge to use it. Either that or pay someone like me to do that part for you.