Open_Source

[christian.peper at kpn.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> I want to know out of your experience people the following,
> 1- How open source served your businesses  requirements?
> 2- What kind of application that running on Open Source?
> 3- General experience with Open Source technology?
> 

It serves bus reqs because it costs less than a high-end Unix systems. Scaling horizontally vs vertically makes more and mroe sense these days with database driven web apps. I can use a Unix high-end database server that drives low cost open source web servers and add more web servers as demand grows. If you're multi-tier and setup properly, this works. However, many of our legacy apps don't fit into this yet. We're working on that. As our many other large firms in the Netherlands (KLM, Rabobank, SNS Reaal, Aegon, Telfort, Shell, etc.) We're starting to eye OpenSolaris as a possible follow-up for Sun Solaris to perhaps limit the use of costly Sun hardware/software even further.

Apps we run on (Oracle) Linux: Siebel, Stellent, Peoplesoft, Oracle DB, AIA, AS, and many more. 

Experiences are great. But you do require knowledgable people (i.e. me!) and time to check needs, inventorize possibilities and create and certify your stack with suppliers and manufacturers. But is no different from using a Windows stack, except the OSS stack has more variables. 
Windows is easy, too easy and no fun. ;) OSS presents a nice challenge to separate then men from the boys. Hihi, pun intended, let the flames begin!

Chris.