[via InformationWeek]
Some *very* good thoughts in this article, have a look!
As large companies move in [the Open Source] direction, they’ve got some issues to deal with. First and foremost, they must find a way to integrate open source into their commercial software environments and support it on an ongoing basis. They want reassurances that open-source code won’t be subject to intel- lectual-property lawsuits. They need procedures established to avoid violating licensing terms that are different from what they’re used to. And, as they move up the open-source “stack” of operating systems, databases, and application servers, they have to decide where to draw the line. Are open-source applications in their future?
Much of the work companies are doing with open source revolves around their key Web-site applications and increasingly around those applications’ underlying databases. There are no sales figures for software that can be downloaded for free and is often introduced into organizations by developers acting on their own rather than going through purchasing departments.
Licensing is one of the greatest challenges for open-source users. “The fact that software is open source doesn’t mean a company can use it in the way they want to use it,” Yahoo’s Zawodny says. Different licenses have different requirements in terms of distributing and modifying code. Yahoo has designated an employee to manage open-source licensing terms and legal issues. “It shouldn’t be scaring people away; people just need to know what they’re getting into,” he says.
It’s a different story at Sabre, which five years ago embarked on a $100 million project to move its air-travel shopping and pricing services off mainframes and onto 13 HP NonStop servers and a cluster of 45 HP Itanium database servers running the open-source MySQL database on Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux. The move was calculated to help the company keep up with growing customer demand for online services.
The initial success of Sabre’s migration toward open-source technology spurred further adoption. Over the past 18 months, the company has migrated more of its services off mainframes to run on 48 Intel Xeon-based HP servers and 177 AMD Opteron-based HP servers running Linux. Sabre’s experience with open source extends to The Ace Orb, or TAO, a Corba 2.5-compliant C++ object request broker, as well as JBoss and Tomcat. Sabre now considers open source whenever it has an IT project up for review.