Future of open-source (Re: Windows virtualization and Linux)

[Rich Braun]

Dan Ritter asked:
> Can you say what you are running?

Well, lessee... DoubleClick back end servers.  Oracle.  Zend on the www hosts.
 UserPlane.  Ticket tracker is from Atlassian Software.  In QA, we have HP
LoadRunner.  All our MySQL servers are on an Enterprise Gold contract.  The
list goes on.  Sure, I'm comfortable with 100% open source on the systems
side, but everything I do is in support of other teams who tell me what apps I
have to run.

> For example, I would typically consider that a desktop Linux box
> will have no support contracts associated with the software.

Yeah, I managed to not have to put Red Hat on the desktops.  That saved us
about 8 licenses.  ;-)

> You
> publish your code on SourceForge or what-have-you, and then you
> can leave it alone, or not.

But to get/give any real benefit to it, you absolutely have to (1) yank out
any hostname- or application-specific stuff related to the internal systems,
and (2) recompile/re-run in an offline environment.  I.e., some level of QA
before I can upload to SourceForge, develop some PowerPoints and present at,
say, a future BLU meeting.  Labor cost may not be much, but it's not zero.

And you can see how overloaded with work I am...note the job posting that I
made earlier today (and on two other occasions during the past year).  This
time I got a couple responses, hopefully I'll have done my little part to ease
the recession for a couple of families.

-rich