software, participants are generally quite knowledgeable and often include the developers
of the software themselves.
Long-term security -- Jim disputes conventional wisdom that betting your business on
proprietary software is safer than relying on open source. If a software company goes out
of business, the small business could go down, too. But with open source, you have the
code, so you could always pay someone to update the code when necessary or fix it
yourself.
Easier improvements -- By doing some of his own PHP programming, Jim had a lot of
flexibility related to adding features. In some cases, he could take existing code and mod-
ify it to suit his needs. To create a special shopping list feature, he found it easiest to write
code from scratch. In the process of using the software, when he found exploitable bugs,
he submitted the code fixes back to the project.
No compatibility problems -- On those occasions where he needed to provide informa-
tion to others, compatibility has not been a problem. When he makes business cards,
door hangers, or other printed material, he saves his artwork to PDF or SVG formats to
send to a commercial printer. Regular documents can be exported to Word, Excel, or
other common formats.
For businesses starting on a shoestring, in many cases open source software can offer both the
cost savings and flexibility needed to help the business survive during the difficult start-up period.
Later, it can help those same businesses thrive, because open source solutions can often be easily
scaled up as the business grows.
Linux in the Enterprise
Building a company's computer infrastructure on open source software represents a huge amount
of confidence that it will provide the level of reliability, security, and features that a company needs.
That's why most large companies converting to open source infrastructures have gone with prod-
ucts from enterprise Linux providers, such as Red Hat, Inc. (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Novell,
Inc. (SUSE Linux Enterprise).
Built into Red Hat's open source enterprise products are features such as Red Hat Directory Server,
Global File System (GFS), and Cluster Suite. Directory Server can scale up to handle millions of
identities, representing settings for applications, user profiles, access control, and policies across
thousands of machines and users. Using GFS and Cluster Suite, an enterprise can treat its entire
storage infrastructure as a common pool to minimize data duplication and simplify backups, sys-
tem recovery, and adding storage and servers.
Companies moving their infrastructures to Linux include Apoteket (Sweden's government-run
pharmacy), which is moving more than 900 pharmacies to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
on Intel servers. Governments that are migrating to RHEL include cities such as Chicago and
Bloomington, Illinois. You can read about other organizations migrating to RHEL on Red Hat's
Success Stories page (
www·redhat·com/solutions/info/casestudies
).
22
Linux First Steps
Part I
