Maria Winslow

After all the buzz about SugarCRM at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo this year in Boston, we caught up with the company's co-founder and VP of Open Source, Clint Oram, to find out more about his hot new project. How did you get started with SugarCRM? The three of us who co-founded SugarCRM, Inc., and the SugarCRM Open Source Project worked together in the CRM industry for several years and saw that the time was right for a commercial Open Source CRM application. With my previous company, I encountered Open Source software and quickly realized how powerful a software development model it really was. We all saw the industry-changing implications of what Open Source development so naturally delivers - open collaboration between the product developers, end users, and IT i... (more)

MySQL for AP Hosted News

The Associated Press (AP), the world's oldest and largest news agency, offers a service that allows news providers to integrate AP online content directly into their Web sites. The service, AP Hosted News, is used by approximately 600 affiliate newspapers and broadcasters. The service handles between 150,000 and 500,000 pages of content per affiliate per day, supporting 11,000 concurrent... (more)

How to Keep Your Options Open

Some organizations will find that they are able to make wide use of open source software, while others will find only limited suitable migration candidates. Some of the discrepancy will be due to differences across industries. Industries that tend to make conservative technology decisions, for example, are likely to have more legacy systems that are difficult to migrate. But even within ... (more)

Huge Savings with OpenNMS for Managed Hosting Company

When Rackspace Managed Hosting started in 1998 to lease Internet colocated servers to customers, they went with Linux almost everywhere in an effort to keep costs down. In fact, heavy use of Linux was standard in the low-margin managed hosting sector. According to IT manager Eric Evans, "people would be surprised by how much they would save if they went with Linux." Linux Servers and a M... (more)

Why We Should Drop the 'Free' Moniker

It became apparent to me recently at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo that our choice of words matters. I was standing at the Mozilla booth when two guys came up and peered over my shoulder. "They're selling the T-shirts here, too," one said with disappointment in his voice, "Let's go." I couldn't believe it - access to the source code isn't enough. Getting award-winning software at no... (more)