State of Open Source

The Benefits of ‘Vendor-Free’ Open Source IT

70% of the enterprises surveyed did their own implementations, while roughly 90% supported their own open-source deployments. This might be a cause for alarm if the projects weren't so successful: 70% of the projects were deemed to be of "Critical" or "High Importance" compared to other IT projects and 90% plan to maintain or increase their investment in open source projects. Could it be that open source is liberating enterprises from an unhealthy dependence on vendors, and that early results suggest that this will be a Very Good Thing for the success of IT projects, many of which have failed historically."

Our projects at my workplace are 100% open source. We run vanilla Debian-Linux servers running PHP & MySQL and we’re investigating Python as a second option for creating web applications. Most of my duties revolve around using SSH, Emacs, and my trusty UNIX toolchain (find, cat, grep, sed).

We’ve come a long way in a short amount of time. Convincing my superiors to get rid of our Windows Server 2003 and IIS deployment a year ago was one of the best things to ever happen.

What frustrates me about my work environment versus my academic environment is the reliance on Microsoft technologies. Visual Basic.NET, ASP.NET, Microsoft Access, and Visual Studio are used in the classroom. It’s completely embarrassing because NOBODY in their right mind uses those tools willingly. An ideal situation would be to drop the Microsoft tools and replace them with their open source equivalents.

Java is already used extensively for the programming courses, I’m sure if someone bothered to look into Java’s GUI toolkits, dropping VB.NET (VB.NET is only used for teaching GUI applications) would just be a question of “Why did it take you so long?”

MySQL would drop right in to the database courses and would remove the reliance on “Wizards” and other baby bib cheatware that allows students to get away with knowing nothing about databases.

PHP would drop right into where ASP.NET is taught, probably to the relief of employers everywhere. Face it, ASP.NET sucks, only companies who got suckered into the windows server stack actually want to keep running ASP.NET.

Finally, Visual Studio is a gigantic IDE that only 10% of its features can possibly be used in a learning environment. Toss that out and teach people how to use VIM or Emacs, they’ll thank you later when they start saving keystrokes. Introductory courses already have students using the nano editor, so we’re already halfway there. Someone just needs to wake up and realize that VIM and Emacs are already on the servers, waiting to be used.

I’m not the only one that has thought of this.

Good news for those going into IT (Score:5, Informative)

I've found the following: - You get smarter, more resourceful people when they are not MSCE drones, but actually programmers that are able to solve a problem, not just relay it up the chain or find the checkbox in the configuration GUI. ... Overall, I think this is great news for smart people going into IT. You will be sought after to lead a company department, and all of those license fees can now contribute to your salary + additional savings for the company. Would you rather earn $x from being a MSCE admin, or $5x managing a vertical open-source system with much more intellectual stimulation? I'd take the latter.