"Companies have gotten comfortable with Linux, and they're scratching their heads and saying, 'The argument for Linux was total cost of ownership and skills, and our developers like it and applications are supporting it,'" says Pierre Fricke, an analyst at D.H. Brown Associates. "Then they start thinking, 'What about this thing called JBoss. Doesn't it offer some of the same things?' And it does."
Network World Fusion article, Open source products grab corporate attention, explains why National Leisure Group moved their J2EE infrastructure from BEA Weblogic to JBoss. The broader Open Source topic is discussed with some interesting insights into corporate backing as well as appropriate cautions....
One of the topics which has also been discussed, is that not all Open Source software is the same. Some Open Source projects lack the energy and direction to be successfull. The article has great advice on this front:...National Leisure Group, which sells vacation packages through sites such as Orbitz and Priceline.com, knew it had to step its services up a notch.
...Cash and his team looked at the costs involved in expanding their server farm to support a broader BEA WebLogic deployment and realized the costs would be a definite hurdle.
"So we began to seek alternatives," he says. "The alternative we landed on was [open source application server] JBoss."
NLG had the JBoss platform running by April 2003. In the first year alone, the savings associated with using the open source application server as opposed to the commercial BEA software amounted to $1 million in avoided licensing fees, Cash says.
"And we were able to scale much faster in terms of technical perspective and in terms of the business," he says.
The bottom line is open source software should be evaluated in the same way as any commercial offering.
"So you find a good piece of code that was produced by a project team and it's available for free. You have to ask: Will that project team continue to invest in the project? Is there any funding mechanism to ensure that they'll be able to continue to invest effort? Do they have a road map? Are they going in a direction you need them to go," Rymer says. "If you were to buy software from a commercial start-up vendor, you'd be asking these questions. You really need to ask them for open source, too."
