Open Source : Not Ready Yet For Enterprises Across The Stack

Chad Dickerson writes, he is running out of options for areas in his IT operation that legitimately shouldn’t be open source. Operating system? Linux works like a champ. Web server? – Apache. Database layer? - MySQL scales fine for most Web-based apps, and basic master/slave software clustering for it is free, which can save roughly six figures over a commercial solution if you’re running more than a couple of database servers. App server? JBoss if you want Java, or you could just use PHP running on Apache, among many other choices.So software is almost free - hardware is cheap and now opensource solutions exist for PBX as well .Chad thinks that suggests that open source can - and will - go anywhere and everywhere. Six years ago, switching to Linux was considered daring enough. Now Linux is so routine no one really cares anymore. Linux gets chosen as it worked flawlessly. Looking farther up the stack, - a quick glance at MySQL AB’s current customer list (France Telecom, Google , Suzuki, to name a few) suggests that the once-revered database layer is no longer sacred. No doubt we will all look back five years from now and feel the same way about open source telephony solutions as solutions such as Asterisk slide down to the comfortable end of the fear curve - just as Apache, Linux, and MySQL have done before.
My Take: Open source solutions at the bottom of the stack – typically workhorse infrastructure elements are getting well entrenched – but even a layer above – lets say starting even at database level – we see the hold loosening and as we move up certainly – opensource becomes one among multiple options. I tend to take a dim view of open source relevance - see Open source -where is the business model, Opensource : Costly & Litigatious, Open Source : Reality Check. We also recently covered Kim Polese view business models of the open source support companies – where the contours of what need to be done to support open source components become quite clear and a not seeing several players in the opensource world thinking along these lines – it would be a major impediment to consider adoption of opensource in enterprises if the support model is not made widely available and the economics and technology upgrade rate demonstrated as beneficial.