|
|
In the current economic slowdown businesses are looking to open source to deliver cost savings. But it delivers much more.
The main benefit of open source is the freedom it delivers. The freedom to download software, alter it, replicate it and distribute it, resulting in a highly innovative range of solutions tailored to suit your business.
|
As well as being a low cost alternative to proprietary software, Open Source software puts the control back in the hands of the user.
25 years of innovation
The Open Source movement was led by a wave of companies separating software from hardware more than 25 years ago.
Following this disruption to the market, Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, created the original BSD Unix standard and Richard Stallman established the Freedom Software Foundation marking the beginning of the open source movement.
The evolution of Open Source software over the last 25 years has taken away the vendor lock-in and subscription model of proprietary software putting control in the hands of the user.
Enterprise adoption
Since its inception 25 years ago, the Open Source movement has moved increasingly into the mainstream and is now at the heart of many commercial offerings.
With its surge into the spotlight fuelled by the growth of the Internet, free and Open Source software is now entering an exciting stage – where businesses try to make the words ‘free’ and ‘open’ their own.
Enterprises are identifying the opportunities to embrace the freedoms provided by open source software and deliver value to their business.
For example, Australian Wealth Management has adopted MySQL to enable it to implement an enterprise standard, costs effective database to support its mission critical systems.
OpenOffice has also seen exceptional growth in the last few months, with downloads now reaching more than 35 million worldwide.
This adoption will continue to grow as businesses and government realise that open source software is not just about low costs.
Sun's open source portfolio
Gartner says, “Today no other vendor can provide as broad and deep a set of open-source technology.” (Source: Open Source at Sun Microsystems, 2008)
Sun overcomes the common issue that CTOs, CIOs and developers have with Open Source software – the perceived lack of support.
What Open Source allows you to do is use the software freely to establish a solution and when needed you can purchase subscriptions from Sun that delivers the support, warranty, indemnity and production tools to scale that solution.
Sun delivers value to enterprises between deploy and scale and this commitment hasn’t changed since its inception 25 years ago.
Open Source is the basis of Sun’s business strategy and entire product range, spanning everything from:
- The Solaris operating system
- Open Storage
- Sun’s MySQL Open Source database
- OpenOffice productivity suite
- The Java development platform
- xVM VirtualBox Virtualisation software
Sun continues to expand its Open Source innovations to enable businesses to make the most of the freedom that open source provides.
|
