Computing Canada, January 12, 2007, Vol. 33, No. 1

Companies welcome the open source incursion

Linux is just one application in the vast open source ecosystem that companies are increasingly turning to for a lower-cost alternative to many of their IT needs
1/16/2007 3:40:00 PM By: Grant Buckler

When online directory provider Yellow.ca launched during the dot-com boom, consultants advised the founders to choose best-of-breed hardware and commercial software. So the Markham, Ont., firm installed Oracle Corp. database software running on Sun Microsystems Inc. servers. “Everybody was under the impression that you've got to buy the best brand to be a dot-com company,” says Dariush Zomorrodi, Yellow's vice-president of new media.

As Yellow.ca grew, Zomorrodi says, it became apparent that scaling its application on Oracle wasn't going to be economical. Licence fees for the server clusters the company needed were too high. So Yellow.ca looked for an alternative and was soon drawn to open source database software. The IT team examined two open source alternatives, PostgreSQL and MySQL. Either could have worked, Zomorrodi says, but “we found that MySQL had a larger user base and the online community was more active, so we thought it was a better one to go for in terms of support.”

Three years later, Zomorrodi doesn't regret that decision. MySQL's limitations on clustered servers forced some compromises at first, he says, but the latest version solves those problems. “I would say now I don't have anything to complain about.”

Running a business on an open source database may seem daring, but it's not as unusual as you might think. While the Linux operating system gets the lion's share of attention, there is plenty of other open source software, some competing with major names such as Oracle and SAP. One of its key advantages is cost.

Darcy Buskermolen, a British Columbia-based consultant at PostgreSQL support provider Command Prompt Inc. of Cascade Locks, Ore., first got involved with PostgreSQL in a previous job. “We required a very feature-rich database, but the nature of what we were doing didn't lend itself at that time to having to pay for the Oracle licensing model,” says Buskermolen. Meanwhile Microsoft's SQL Server would not do what Buskermolen wanted. His previous employer chose PostgreSQL, considering it more powerful than MySQL.

Many organizations from small businesses to large corporations are running Linux on servers, and Linux systems power major businesses such as Google Inc., Continental Airlines Inc. and Sabre Holdings Corp. International Data Corp. predicts that a quarter of all computer servers shipping in 2008 will run Linux.

Linux's popularity is nothing compared to the impact of open source software that helps operate the Web. The open source Apache Web server has about 60 per cent market share, according to the November 2006 Web Server Survey from Netcraft Ltd., a Bath, U.K.-based Internet services company - though it has lost some ground to Microsoft in recent months. The open source BIND software has a similarly commanding share of the Domain Name Server (DNS) market.

From that base, open source is pushing up the software stack, into database, development tools and even enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM).

“We're seeing many, many customers start with Linux,” says Zack Urlocker, executive vice-president of products at MySQL, “and then once they're familiar with it, 80 per cent want to have an open source database.”

Particularly among those developing Web-based applications and services, the LAMP stack is a popular buzzword today. LAMP is an acronym referring to building Web-based systems with Linux, the Apache Web-server software, MySQL and one of three open source programming languages - PHP, Perl or Python.

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