Is There An Open Source Solution?

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December 18, 2000 (2:27 PM EST)

By Jason Levitt ,

With little or no marketing budget, open source software is finding its way into the back offices of the largest companies and is powering some of the highest-bandwidth websites on the Internet.

Not only does open source software rarely have the benefit of professional marketing, but companies that do deploy it in their infrastructures often hesitate to admit it. Security concerns are one reason, but developers in IT departments often use open source without the knowledge of higher-level management. The result is a general lack of dialogue, both inside and outside businesses, about the use and effectiveness of open-source software.

The most ubiquitous and well-known open-source software -- the Apache Web server, the Perl scripting language, the Sendmail message transport agent, Linux operating system, and the GNU C Compiler -- already command dominant market shares in their respective categories for many classes of business applications. While Linux has had a well-funded marketing push in the past year or so, other products have spread to IT departments by word of mouth or because no better alternatives existed.

Still, some widely used or particularly innovative open source products aren't very well-known outside the developer community but have become critical components of back offices and websites. IT managers and developers should be aware of their potential for assisting in the development of business infrastructure.

Free software doesn't equal good software. Open source software doesn't always scale as well as its commercial counterparts, and it may lack some sophisticated features. Occasionally, the opposite is true.

But as Linux has proven repeatedly, by way of Microsoft's comparisons of Linux to Windows NT, capable open source quickly becomes the standard by which commercial products are measured. This has become especially apparent as third-party support for open source software has blossomed.

The overall quality of documentation and installation procedures for open source has improved as well. The result is that business customers are no longer as concerned about open source support and quality control issues when considering deployment in the enterprise.

A good example of a capable open source product is Mico (the acronym stands for Mico Is Corba), a fully Corba 2.0-compliant version of Corba middleware.

Mico is proof that open source can compete favorably head-to-head with commercial implementations. It benefits from Corba compliance certification from the Open Group; Proven interoperability with commercial Corba object request brokers such as Iona Technologies' Orbix and Borland's Visibroker; Ports available for most Unix and Unix-like operating systems, as well as various Windows flavors -- even a Palm OS version is in the works;

One recent Mico success story is the Weather Channel, a cable-TV station that uses Mico in its weather data distribution system for North America. The system aggregates data from multiple sources at the Atlanta headquarters of the Weather Channel and transmits it via satellite link to thousands of cable "head ends" so that viewers can view a local weather segment tailored to their specific geographic region.

According to IT support staff at the Weather Channel, any outages in this system affect revenue directly, and Mico has seen four months of continuous operation with no problems.

Perhaps better known than Mico, but still widely used without the benefit of marketing support, is Squid, an open-source proxy-caching server. Squid can store Web data on a system closer to the requesting site than to the source. Web browsers can then use the local Squid cache as a proxy HTTP server, reducing access time as well as bandwidth congestion.

Squid has kept a low profile in a crowded market of performance-enhancing commercial products, but it performed well enough to beat out Novell and Infolibria for Network Computing's Well-Connected award last spring in the network-caching solution category. US West started using Netscape Proxy Server several years ago to allow employees remote access to the company LAN but switched to Squid because it was faster and more reliable.

In October, at the third annual Web Polygraph Cache-Off, a performance-testing event where proxy-caching products are given performance evaluations, Squid compared favorably with a field of mostly far more expensive commercial alternatives.