Cost-Conscious Companies Turn To Open Source 249
Martyr4BK writes "BusinessWeek has a slew of special reports today on open source software discussing the benefits for buyers who are cost conscious and open source being the silver lining for the economic slump. They even have a slideshow of 'OSS alternatives' like Linux, Apache, MySQL, Firefox, Xen, Pentaho, OpenOffice.org, Drupal, Alfresco, SugarCRM, and Asterisk. These are all good examples (we use a bunch of them already); what other open source software can I use to drop my company's IT costs, and maybe get a decent bonus for the year?"
Would love to... (Score:3, Informative)
Web Filter (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Couldn't find the slideshow mentioned... (Score:5, Informative)
I use planner.
Have you tried it? I find it is adequate for my needs. Mind you I am not the most hardcore project management user out there...
Re:Couldn't find the slideshow mentioned... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"Alternative"? (Score:3, Informative)
Time was, MySQL was an open source alternative to 'non-enterprise' DBs like FoxPro. Now it's a viable alternative to Oracle or DB2 in certain circumstances where the high end commercial features are overkill.
Re:Couldn't find the slideshow mentioned... (Score:1, Informative)
At Sun Microsystems, we've been working on something that I think is the perfect Project Management system. Project Kenai ( http://kenai.com/ ) has provided everything I've needed, from SVN/Mercurial (It should have others, maybe Git), a Wiki, BugTracker (using Bugzilla atm) and it also has a Social aspect to it. It was in private beta until recently, but I believe anyone can sign up and use it now.
Re:Migration doesn't sound like cost cutting. (Score:4, Informative)
Linux/F/OSS is mostly supported by angel investors and Sun Microsystems
This is just completely wrong. Most open source projects have no outside investors at all, but are either maintained on a developer's free or salaried time. IBM, Apple, and Google, for example, have hundreds of employees who contribute to open source projects on company time.
I don't know why you would think so many projects would be backed by angel investors when those projects would return nothing financially on their investment.
Re:Couldn't find the slideshow mentioned... (Score:3, Informative)
I use dotProject: http://dotproject.net/ [dotproject.net]
It's not exactly an application or linux only, as it is a web app, but it is free and open source. And it allows many users to input into a process. Currently our project manager manages everything with MS Project using some of its features. This type of product allows managers (or at least in our case) to offload some of the updating to the workers since they can log their own progress.
I've used a few other web app managers but dotProject seemed to have the most features. Not exactly a piece of cake to configure, but it is quite powerful.
Re:TCO not always lower (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Works for me (Score:3, Informative)
Don't think splunk is open source...
OpenProj (Score:1, Informative)
I use OpenProj http://openproj.org/openproj