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The Linux distillery Real answers to the question “Can you run your business on Linux and open source?”
The Linux distillery Real answers to the question “Can you run your business on Linux and open source?” | Real answers to the question “Can you run your business on Linux and open source?” |
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| Written by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 26 November 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 3 My first respondent raised an excellent point, telling me “the biggest reason of moving is that you can move away from the high price [of] licenses that are required with Windows.”Still on the financials, my correspondent added “there are also the lower admin overheads and higher availability” implicitly referring to the way Linux systems can be set running with minimal maintenance required, whereas Windows administrators still like to perform a routine periodic reboot just for safety. On the subject of lost services he told me the only thing they noticed out of the box was out-of-office notifications. “These are still there and could be done with straight distro installs, but the administrator would have to apply them to the MTA config (unless you use openXchange or zimbra)” he said. No other problems where noticed. He reported they had solved authentication issues using LDAP with replication to all servers and using Samba 3.0.24. This, he said, had slick integration with XP clients and Windows 2003 servers in both directions. Additionally, his company enhanced their mail platform by using “Postfix for the MTA with amavis and spamassassin.” This, he advised, took a little tuning to stop spamassassin giving false positives but was do-able. This wasn’t the death knell for Windows, however. The company still had to retain some Windows servers due to specific accounting and CRM applications with no suitable Linux equivalent – but apart from these niche line-of-business apps, all core server functions were fully replaced with Linux equivalents. “All in all,” he finished, “I would suggest that Linux be used where ever it’s possible to do so, but Windows (in the short term) will still play a small part in the server network.” This was a very heartening response and should give confidence to doubters. Yet, I noticed that this organisation opted to leave desktop computers alone. As I talked with other people I pushed harder, asking if they’d genuinely consider going a total open source route, running their enterprise solely on Linux and applications like Open Office. |
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