Mickael N
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Is your enterprise using Free Open Source Software (FOSS)?
Tell me about your experience, I am writing an article on the FOSS market and I need some fresh testimonies.
Good Answers (1)
Vijay Patnaik व
Recruitments, Foreign Education and Immigration Consulting; vijay@careersearch.org; www.careersearch.org; +9198250VFISH
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We have been and stilll using a lot of FOSS, since 8 years now. The best part is there are lot of freeware in FOSS, and if you have an inhouse FOSS developer or tweaker, it works out cheaper than Licensing.
License free Applications such as these are already in use :
Email Server
Web server
File server
CRM softwares
PIM
Sales Force Automation
Video on Demand
Knowledge Management
Web applications
Datamining, et al
We have earlier given Fault-Tolerant, bug-free, dual-redundant systems to our clients.
FOSS is highly integrable to lots of licensed software and devices too.
Looking forward to FOSS mobiles, laptops, HDTV, Video streaming, VOIP, ...
Links:
More Answers (13)
I would find it hard to believe that an enterprise is not using FOSS. Bits and pieces of high profile Open Source projects are embedded in so many products that separating them would nearly be impossible. For those of us that directly use Open Source, the advantages of using it have to be weighed against the costs of using it. If you have the technical expertise in house to support a project, the cost savings can be significant. If you don't have that in house talent, the cost of ownership can approach or exceed commercially supported systems. In my opinion, convincing people that Open Source is not free can be difficult. In the end, you have to weigh all the options and pick the best solution. Sometimes it is going to be Open source, sometimes it is going to be commercial off the shelf software. The real trick is knowing the difference.
No, i don't think we have any FOSS software here.
Cammon R
Creative Director for CopperRain Productions, Creating sweet video for our clients
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We use it all the time. I think the program that is used the most by my company is called blender. It's a powerful 3D modeling/rendering app. We use it in many of the corporate videos we produce.
The best part about this kind of software is that there are thousands of people working on tools for it. Every time we turn around someone else has developed some kind of plug in or something that helps things move along. When it comes down to it Open software is really what the internet is about. Communities working to make things faster and better.
Links:
Yes, we are using various flavours of Linux and BSD on the desktop and as servers. All were fairly easy to install and caused very little trouble when in use. There are thousands of applications ready to use and most work extremely well.
Working for a College I can say we, as most of the colleges and universities across the world, make extensive use of FOSS. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the fact that it is free, but it has all to do with the fact that in many areas there is no equivalent commercial solution or the open source solution outperforms or is equivalent to the commercial one. Take for instance High Performance Computing Clusters, which run mostly on Linux and most of the simulation software that runs on them, i.e. molecular dynamics simulation and others. I am going to avoid the whole talk of free vs. full time equivalent and software support since it has been discussed enough. I hope this prospective helps your columns.
We are using FOSS, but only for Systems Administrators. Without a support model for the FOSS applications, it is difficult to manage, and the existing technical staff ends up being the support of last resort when an FOSS application gets tied into a production system that fails. We have offered to include FOSS in any applications portfolio, however "ownership" and support of the FOSS application is required to be documented.
Yes, in back-office and development environments but not in production and client-server deployments.
Paulino M
CMS Expert, Instructor and Technical Writer
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A different scenario. Here on East Timor, our UN international IT team work on the Ministry of Justice and all network servers is running over Linux. Also e-mail, websites and intranet (using free software also), proxy, NAT and communications between different buildings across the country. We have Linux and Windows workstations but the applications like office suite, browser, imagin processing and e-mail and chat clients are free/open source software.
Best
Ross C
President and CTO at Novell Canada
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Of course. We here at Novell are not just providers of a distro and contributors to numerous FOSS projects, we live in this world every day. Every single Novell employee who uses an office suite (nearly 5,000) people live in OpenOffice. We made a business financial decision some years ago to stop using a proprietary office suite and switch to OpenOffice. We contribute a great deal back into the project as well. We use Apache on Web servers, and include thousands of FOSS packages in our SUSE Linux Enterprise distro, a distro we also live by on our servers and our desktops. Open source software works for business. We have thousands of customers who use Linux and open source every day, and we are one ourselves.
Good luck with your article.
Ross
Siddhartha T
Head of Marketing & Inside Sales
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Blue Star infotech, has a center of excellence for FOSS and has developed various projects for its customers using Open Source technology.
We would be having close to 200+ resources on FOSS.
Benefit of LAMP / Open source I donot think I should discuss ( Well known and too foolish for me to discuss here).
Any one needing any help on foss get in touch
Cheers
Sidd
Links:
Short answer: yes. All the previous companies that I worked in (in software engineering industry) were using FOSS. It may not be the same case in other industries as software engineering tends to be tightly coupled with use of specific tools and programs to get your work done. But still, even within soft. eng. industry, your mileage may vary depending on the development platform used. Development for *nix systems (Linux, Solaris, HPUX, OSX) tends to exploit FOSS to larger extent.
In fact nowadays there seems to be larger tendency (perhaps less fear associated with it) to use FOSS throughout industry and you, as an end user, even may not be aware of the fact that the services you access are completely or partially build upon free (as in freedom) software.
I guess that, when developing a solution based on OSS, it is important to balance what will be re-injected in the OS community and what will not. Because, when using OSS, a part of the code written will fall into the OSS licence used , whereas a part of it will remain proprietary ( final application ) .
I think that , the smaller the company is , the higher will be the interest in participating to an OSS . Since your development manpower may not be sufficient to maintain ( meaning debugging, platform porting ... ) a complex software, it is interesting to share this effort with others. But of course, you have to keep your own and specific knowledge and added value ...
So , there is a tight equilibrium to find between the vulture and the lamb.
Another point is the difficulty to promote such point of view within your company and most of all, in front of your boss who may not see the real interest of re-injecting s/w in the OS community.
Yes, we use them. We develop an embedded system running Linux, so our tool chain and base libraries are FOSS. The support infrastructure of the software development group mostly use FOSS. Since we are a small team, we generally try to look first at FOSS for new tools or functionnalities. They are generally easier to try and adapt to our need and if something goes wrong we only need to lookup at the source or to the net to find a solution.