BYTE MARKS
Open Source saves people money
By Burt Lum
In the world of corporate computing, it is rare to find altruistic behavior.
Let's face it, information technology and software development are big business. It's all about market dominance. If you're an early user of such software as dBase, Rbase or Foxpro, chances are you've noticed the trend of products being whittled down to an elite few. That's the nature of market dynamics — the surviving software will dominate.
When this occurs, choices for consumers decrease and the cost of software increases. A movement to fight this trend ,called Open Source (check out opensource.org) is gaining momentum. Open Source, which gained popularity through the Web, holds to the precept that the source code of the application should be freely distributed and its use nondiscriminatory.
Successful examples of software inspired by this movement include Apache (Web server software), Perl (scripting for Web sites), Sendmail (e-mail server software), Gallery (photo gallery software), MySQL (database software) and the list goes on.
Saving users money is an important goal of Open Source.
A good example of this is Todd Ogasawara and his team, who were commissioned to build an Intranet portal for the state of Hawai'i. Unfortunately 9/11 and its adverse effect on the economy resulted in financing for Ogasawara's project being nixed.
But the need for the portal remained. So Ogasawara and his team, with the use of Open Source tools, completed the project with considerable savings.
Find out how he and his team did it. His presentation at the Open Source Convention in San Diego in July, titled "Open Source Tools in Government Intranet Projects: Making Something Out of Nothing" can be found at conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2002/view/e_sess/2456. A video of the project is available at www2.state.hi.us/dags/icsd/content/video/higovdemo.avi.
The results, and the savings of the project, are a validation of the Open Source revolution. ;-)
Burt Lum is a click away at burt@brouhaha.net.
