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 the same industries, technical managers will find a
range of potential migration scenarios. The differences in experience will
depend on the platform-neutrality of the applications in use.
Those organizations that have made heavy use of Web-based technologies, and
kept it platform-neutral, will have the most migration opportunities now.
When the Web browser began to replace the operating system as a computing
platform, some technical managers understood that this was the wave of the ... (more)
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 Mix of DesktopsEvans supports a little under 200 servers for internal
company use. Evans put all of the internal services that he could on Linux
servers, including e-mail, file servers, print serve... (more)
Web site content management can be difficult, and commercial products can be
expensive. Luckily, a few open source projects are highly recommended for the
job. In fact, eWeek has claimed that Bricolage was one of the best content
management systems it has ever seen, even among commercial offerings, and
Mambo won best of show at LinuxWorld this February. In this article, I'll get
you started with an overview of these examples of production-ready open
source projects.
Bricolage
Bricolage (http://bricolage.cc) is a free open source content management and
publishing system. Its full... (more)
Open Source Java Application Servers
Activity around open source projects related to Java is building. You
probably already know about JBoss, an open source Java application server,
but there are other options as well. Geronimo, an open source Java
application server under the Apache umbrella, has come a long way towards
becoming a potential replacement for proprietary servers like IBM's
WebSphere. IBM even employs a majority of the committers on Geronimo, an
indication that they see the writing on the wall. And the high status of
being a part of the Apache Software Foundation ... (more)
In September, core developers of Mambo, the popular open source content
management system, announced a fork of the project, called Joomla!, with
virtually all active participants following the fork.
I caught up with Andrew Eddie, lead developer of the new Joomla!, to find out
more about the decision to fork the Mambo project, and to find out how things
are going so far.
LWM: I'll start with the hard question first: What led you to the decision to
fork Mambo?
Andrew Eddie: Forking is a very serious decision to make and one that I and
the team did not take lightly. In the words of... (more)