Best Open Source Alternatives To Enterprise Apps 348
PeekAB00 writes "With 2009 IT budgets getting chopped down John Perez came up with this list of 25 best alternatives to enterprise applications (e.g DimDim over Webex, SugarCRM instead of Seibel, Zenoss over HP OpenView). John's list is somewhat eclectic. I am curious to hear what other enterprise (let's be frank ... expensive) apps I can replace this year with open source ones. I am particularly interested in back-up and email archiving suggestions."
NOT all open source (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhhh, a lot of the solutions mentioned in TFA are not open source, but they are cheaper than their more expensive competition. i.e. Basecamp, dimdim, etc. are not open source..
OTOH, SugarCRM, asterisk, open office are open source, free in both senses.
Anyway, an interesting list...
Re:the most cost effective applications on the mar (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about now...but I used to monitor bugtraq and it scared me into never, EVER using phpBB.
Can't take recommendations seriously (Score:1, Insightful)
Recommending MySQL is just stupid. Not only is its development at Sun in question, it is a poor excuse as a replacement for a commercial database.
As the MySQL fanbois are used to saying, "MySQL is good enough for what I do," a commercial database is held, and rightly so, to a higher standard to which MySQL fails miserably to measure. Yea, sure, the MySQL guys can cook single instance benchmarks that look impressive, but the scalability, reliability, and feature set lack on a professional level.
I don't even need to say which is the better alternative because everyone knows what it is. Since the guy recommends MySQL, this means he didn't evaluate the application space well enough to make the recommendations he does.
Re:the most cost effective applications on the mar (Score:3, Insightful)
Training and support, for starters. You're pretty much on your own on these 2 things when it comes to so called "free" software, and the TCO ends up being more expensive than a paid application.
Re:Check the costs (Score:3, Insightful)
{Glib answer #1} Because it's owned by Documentum.
{Glib answer #2, but also serious} Why wouldn't it be? Just because it's open source doesn't automatically make it cheap/free.
Re:Can't take recommendations seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but none of those are very important. If a transaction fails when you're updating your Facebook profile, nobody gives a shit. I mean look at what happened to Slashdot when it got 24 million posts.
I would bet money that none of those companies use MySQL for their paycheck processing software.
I don't dislike MySQL, but I wouldn't consider it an "enterprise RDBMS".
Re:Can't take recommendations seriously (Score:4, Insightful)
When they say the MySQL will not scale like Oracle they are mostly right. The exceptions where MySQL works are when you design a application around MySQL and use just one installation of MySQL per application. When you do this and it works what you are really doing is using mySQL is a fancy kind of file system.
With Oracle you can build an enterprise database that holds _everything_ and all you applications can access the same database. There are some great advantages when you do this
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:the most cost effective applications on the mar (Score:2, Insightful)
This is enterprise software. Not something that normal users are getting their grubby little claws on. We admins can figure this stuff out pretty easily. How often do any of us need actual paid-for training for any software?
Re:the most cost effective applications on the mar (Score:5, Insightful)
You're pretty much on your own on these 2 things when it comes to so called "free" software, and the TCO ends up being more expensive than a paid application.
That is not true generally, although it can be if you really go out of your way to implement something badly.
It's a MS talking point and it conveniently overlooks that most of the time with proprietary software you're paying for a steep license fee AND pay for support or a support contract separately. We use majority OSS here and the TCO blows away proprietary alternatives.
If we need support on an OSS choice we choose to purchase it, so far we haven't needed any. The other bogus argument frequently raised is that there's a productivity hit on time you spend researching solutions for OSS issues. That's another one that never happens in reality and also ignores the hours proprietary admins spend pouring over knowledge base searches.
Most for profit companies are squeezing their workforce so hard for profits these days that service in many companies is worse than what you get from OSS.
Not enterprise at all! (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep hearing about 'alternatives to enterprise software' and invariably the same mistake pops up over and over: Alternatives to enterprise software are non-enterprise software!
Seems pretty obvious, right? Let's look at what is commonly meant by "enterprise," at least by those who live in that world.
I want software that has been thoroughly documented, tested, and proven. It NEEDS a decently long track record! It NEEDS a formal support mechanism behind it.
If I buy something like backup software (with a support contract of course), The vendor has to be able to tell me, "It will work _this_ way." Not "it should..." or "we thought it would..." But hey, bugs happen, right? When I discover a bug that affects my enterprise, I have to be able to go to the vendor and say "fix this" and have it done. When something breaks in the middle of the night, I need to be able to get definitive technical support within a pre-specified time frame.
Enterprise software is only marginally about the compiled code you get on a CD. It's primarily about support, robustness, and guarantees of quality. It's about strict patch release management, and conservative changes.
If you want to run (say) Amanda instead of NetBackup, that's fine--it's a decent piece of software as far as I've seen; but understand that by itself it's not an enterprise tool. The support mechanism around it is what makes it enterprise software (or not).
It's a simple cost analysis--how much will your company lose if software "x" dies, and how much of an increased risk is there in using freeware vs. buying a commercial product from a given vendor?
Re:OpenOffice works on Windows??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Install the xubuntu-desktop package, only in breezy. If you are using Hoary now you will have to wait till Breezy is released and you upgrade.
Breezy? Hoary? I wish they'd speak in normal language.
Re:Forum software enterprise, but no Exchange? (Score:3, Insightful)
So as long as you maintain the trademarks and logos as required, you're otherwise free to use the software as you choose. Should Yahoo! stop publishing Zimbra, there's nothing saying you couldn't keep using it and even keep developing it, as long as you don't change the name or trademarks associated with it. Yes, that means you can't fork it to become Ximbra (for example),
It also means that you can't fork it under the same name unless you happen to own the rights to the name "Zimbra". The GPL uses copyright law to its advantage, the ZPL uses trademark law.
My fear is someone like Microsoft buying the rights to the name Zimbra in order to kill the product.
The near total BS of support contracts. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a MS talking point and it conveniently overlooks that most of the time with proprietary software you're paying for a steep license fee AND pay for support or a support contract separately.
Something the Dijkstra noted and is worth repeating. When people say you need to pay for an application and support. You are often saying "You are paying for an application that likely does not work as described in some way and us to come fix it".
This isn't maintenance in the classic sense. There is little in the way of wear and tear on software. It's insurance against a broken application.
That said it's often not even very good insurance. Unless you are in an organization with some real pull with your vendor (that is to say you are very big or they are very small). You are really paying for the vendor to fix it when and if they feel like it. Worse you are, in most cases absolutely forbidden to fix the software yourself.
This leaves me asking the question. Who would pay for this kind of "support". The answer seems to be "People who don't or can't hire skilled IT"
Again there is a kind of support (often lumped under the same name) that can be helpful and this is deployment support. However again if you are running a shop with skilled IT people. This is often a fifth wheel.
I can't count the number of times we have had some vendor in to "train" us and sat through a demo which was essentially "Clicking on this button does pretty much what you would expect". When it came time to ask questions ("What happens during a network failure", "That schema element is already used how do we reconfigure your app to use another") they were clueless.
In fact my team has spent more time helping vendors install their product into our environment than the other way around.....don't even get me started on vendors who resell another vendors product and have signed a contract to do all the first line support for it or third-party system integrators. Most of those people I've met could be thrown in a woodchipper and nobody would miss them.
Re:Can't take recommendations seriously (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem wasn't entirely integer overflow. From the description here [slashdot.org] it sounds like they had a foreign key index using a different data type than the row it referenced. It shouldn't even be possible to do that.