Open source in 2007: Buying up the stack

LinuxWorld Magazine ran this article yesterday about open source's move up the stack. (Thanks, Russ, for pointing me to it.) Rather than wondering whether open source has arrived (it has), the article asks, "Where?":

“Open source has won the first battle: It is now listed among the default platform decisions,” says Dave Jenkins, CTO at online outdoor sporting goods retailer Backcountry.com in Park City, Utah. The next step, open source users agree, is moving up the stack and figuring out which open source tools are ready for enterprise deployments.

“Infrastructure open source products are essentially a no-brainer at this point, but the adoption of enterprise applications has been slow,” says Curtis Edge, CIO at The Christian Science Monitor, which revamped its Web sites with open source software last year.

So, where do you look? Up the stack.

Not everything is perfect in open source land, of course. You need to do a little homework to determine what's ready, and what's best waiting on. But LinuxWorld provides a rough guide here:

Where things stand

Open source is going mainstream, but not all open source tools are equal. Here’s a look at how enterprise-ready some free software products are:
Most mature: development tools (Eclipse, Hibernate, Struts), server operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD)

Maturing: application servers (JBoss, Geronimo), security software (Snort, Nessus)

Growing: collaboration (Zope, Drupal), content management (Alfresco, OpenCms), directory services (OpenLDAP)

Emerging: databases (MySQL, Ingres), enterprise applications (SugarCRM, Compiere), portals (Jetspeed, Zope), search engines (Apache Lucene, ht://Dig), virtualization software (Xen)

Embryonic: integration services (openadaptor), enterprise service buses (Open ESB, Mule), process management applications (OpenFlow)

Let's put it this way: whatever you're looking for, open source has it. You just need to determine how far the niche you need to fill has come in the open source world. In many (and, increasingly, most) cases, the answer is "It's ready for prime time."

Or you could spend that $1M on proprietary software to adorn your shelf space. I mean, you do need something ugly to sit there.

Posted by Matt Asay on January 10, 2007 07:47 PM

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COMMENTS

I'd question their criteria for defining the maturity level. Right now it just looks random. How does MySQL compare to Eclipse? Eclipse cannot manage my relational tables at all, why is it up in the list then?

The list should've been dissected into the industry sectors, otherwise it's only measuring the hype, not the real proliferation and maturity of the OSS products.

Posted by: Andrew Perepelytsya at January 11, 2007 07:12 AM

There are many other mature and high quality open source products, but many of them are hard to find. But I recently discovered a portal http://www.osalt.com/ which lets you search for well-known commercial product - and then helps you find open source alternatives.
The alternatives might not be a one-to-one match, but who uses all features in e.g. Visio anyway. :-)

Posted by: Eric F at January 12, 2007 01:41 AM

They forgot a whole bunch of reporting tools and the PDF engine that is built in into most of these tools. I'd put iText in the list of maturing projects, especially now that there's a book about it ;-)
I can't wait to see what Gavin King is going to do integrating iText into Seam.

Posted by: Bruno Lowagie at January 12, 2007 03:08 AM

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