Open Source Software

As a builder and seller of software, you may think I would not be a proponent of Open Source. And you would be wrong. I love Open Source; not for idealogical reasons, but because I can get great applications at little or no cost. Our firm is fairly small, and it's important that my modest development staff remain focused on engineering products. For internal requirements, we often turn to Open Source.

One such application is the Blogging software blojsom. And no, this blog is not written with blojsom, I use regular ole Blogger here. Blojsom was easy to set up and meets our needs for corporate blogging; which is actually a journal style knowledge base. Blojsom isn't perfect, administering a blog is clumsy, as is adding and editing entries. But the application is stable and attractive.

We also use Moodle. Moodle is software for running web based education. It is very mature and feature rich. We have only scratched the surface of the application's capabilities, but I am impressed. Moodle has the advantage of an active community.

Of course underneath these applications is Open Source infrastructure. In our case this includes MySQL, Apache Tomcat, and PHP. I don't believe any of these are up to the task of their commercial counterparts, but for the internal needs of a small business they are perfectly fine. With the exception of PHP, these were very easy to set up on a Windows 2003 Server. PHP was a bit more difficult as we configured it with Microsoft IIS instead of the recommended Apache web server.

Although not open source, we also use the free application Actitime from Actimind. Actitime performs timetracking. Interestingly, it uses a combination of ASP.NET and MySQL. I highly recommend Actitime and have considered using their developers as consultants on some of our development projects.

These are real apps being used by a real company to do business on a daily basis. Our usage of these applications clearly demonstrates the traction made by open source providers. I look forward to expanding our list; anyone know a good open source accounting package? Or how about CRM? ERP?