- +
Order Takers to Innovators 02/10/2007 15:20:08
How four CIOs energized their staffs to take risks with new technology and generate fresh value for their businessesWhen David Behen became IT director for Washtenaw County, Michigan, the department was little more than an order-taker. And not a very good one. It was kind of like the waiter who makes you wait, then brings the entree with the mains and brings you a bottle of Grange when you asked for a carafe of the house red
Read up on the latest ideas and technologies from companies that sell hardware, software and services. Mobile Solutions Deliver Improved Efficiency to Star Track Express
How to Beef Up Your Sales Pipeline
Solve Exchange Storage Problems Once and For All: A New Approach without Stubs or Links
Understanding Email Marketing: A Guide for SMBs
Choices in Storage Architecture for Oracle Environments
Revolutionising Back-up and Recovery
Realizing the Value of Unified Communications
Email Archiving Implementation: Five Costly Mistakes to Avoid
Zones provide focussed content from Computerworld and leading technology partners.Newsletter Subscription
According to the president and CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst, children are taught as early as preschool that sharing is an essential part of learning to get along with others.
Yet some people still can't grasp the concept of sharing code or they reject open source software because of the monetary value of ideas.
Claiming that "open source is the greatest driver in technology," Whitehurst suggested IT professionals take another look at the open source model as a response to solving the most talked-about computing issues, such as globalisation, security and the green movement.
This week Nokia announced plans to create the Symbian Foundation, which will make the Symbian mobile operating system an open platform, with licenses to be offered royalty-free.
(See Microsoft's cynical response to the Symbian announcement)
TV production company FremantleMedia Australia made headlines when it moved to the open source IP telephony system, Asterix, for a 150-plus handset deployment.
Also this week, Open Source Law founder Brendan Scott discussed the legal implications of FOSS in Australian government and enterprise.
But despite the growth in open source adoption by enterprise, many organisations are reluctant to deploy FOSS because they simply don't know how.
Lower ownership and acquisition costs lead the pack in one survey of enterprise FOSS adoption, while product support concerns and lack of awareness are the biggest hindrances.
Has your enterprise adopted open source software recently?
What considerations hamper or facilitate the adoption of FOSS in your workplace?
What do you think the pros and cons of FOSS are, from an economic, support or technical point of view?
Tell us what free and open source software means to you and your employer...
Computerworld Member Login
Prioritizing Services with IT Service Management (ITSM)
Computerworld Live Webinar
Wednesday 20th, August 2008
11:00am EST (Sydney, Australia)
To be repeated on:
Thursday 4th, September 2008
11:00am EST (Sydney Australia)
Sign up and receive a free copy of The Forrester WaveTM Service Desk Management Tools, Q2 2008 at the conclusion of the Webinar.
Attend and discover:
- How to deliver value to your business through ITSM
- Best practice ITSM implementation
- Why emphasis is changing from optimizing IT management processes to better servicing customers and demonstrating real dollar value
- If service-oriented ITSM is best for your business
- +
Computerworld Live Podcast #97: The Future of Enterprise Networking 25/07/2008 09:45:36
This week CW Live chats with Mark Thompson, global sales and marketing manager for HP ProCurve, on the future of the enterprise networking. Mark discusses the trends we can expect to see in the near future and how the right infrastructure can ensure your enterprise network is secure. - +
Computerworld Live Podcast #96: Security at the Edge 11/06/2008 09:22:22
CW Live speaks with Amol Mitra, HP ProCurve Director of Marketing for Asia Pacific and Japan. Today's topic: how enterprises are starting to shift away from simply controlling security via server logins, firewalls and moving to more adaptive security frameworks. - +
Data Management Edition #10: Multi-Petascale Systems 02/05/2008 09:12:33
This week we look at sustainability and the development of multicore technologies to build multi-petascale systems. - +
IT Security Edition #11: How to poison the Storm botnet 01/05/2008 08:51:55
This week CW Live presents a case study on how to poison the notorious Storm botnet . Plus we take a look at Cisco's plans for Ironport. - +
IT Security Edition #10: Cyber-battles fought and won 24/04/2008 11:09:47
Vendors bow to end user pressure to improve product security, and we take a look at the latest concepts shaping the cyber-battlefield of the future.
Viva la Verticals! Key to Vendor Growth is Through Vertical Market Opportunities, Says IDC 2008-09-05 11:05:00+10
F-Secure delivers fastest protection in the online world 2008-09-04 16:50:00+10
NETGEAR expands ProSafe team as business-class products take off in SME market 2008-09-04 16:27:00+10
Rogue security apps dominate Fortinet's Aug 2008 IT threat report 2008-09-04 16:00:00+10
Adaptec Intelligent Power Management Reduces Storage Power Consumption Up to 70 Percent 2008-09-04 11:28:00+10
Web Security SaaS: The Next Generation of Web Security
Discover the latest web security SaaS solutions. Learn how to increase overall security effectiveness and reduce the burden on your IT department. Uncover the security challenges facing SMB environments today and identify the critical elements that can provide you with lower-cost and easier-to-manage web security solutions.
Comments
FOSS in underfunded health and education sectors
I am a systems administrator at a large sydney hospital and while open source software represents only a small percentage of our total software base, where it is applied in areas such as medical imaging I, and other staff, have found it to be just as good as if not better than proprietary alternatives.
When you consider the pecuniary benefits, especially in the underfunded health industry, and the high quality of support and development that some (but not all) open source software offers, it is certainly a viable alternative.
While our hospital would not favour open source software over proprietary, we certainly evaluate and consider it with as much weight as anything offered by traditional proprietary vendors.
I believe another long suffering industry in terms of funding - education- could also benefit from free and open source software in the same way as health has and is.
It seems with those examples
It seems with those examples you listed that open source is taking off because the sheer number of licenses needed to cover all the machines they'd be deploying the software on would drive the cost up dramatically.
Not to mention their strict performance requirements would make closed source stuff similarly unattractive.
But I think the thing stopping open source gaining more traction is to do with a corporate mindset that links cost to quality: "How can something that costs nothing be better than something that costs tens of thousands of dollars?"
Most people still don't realise how commonly used open source is
I've seen a lot of comments from people about how ready open source is or not, and whether it's ready for the big game. These people are missing the point. It's already there.
Look at the biggest websites now. Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook? Sure they're not all running on open source software, but most of them are heavily using it already.