September 2009 Archives

I am sure by now that if your IT organization had not researched the use of Open Source tools and software in the past, the current budget environment has forced some form of analysis.  I continue to be surprised at the level of angst some have towards the use of open source solutions.  There are a lot of good applications and tools that have been written and are widely used.  At the City of Tucson we use: SNORT, OSSEC, Open DNS, NMAP, Apache, MySQL, Drupal, and Open Office to name just a few.  We are in the process of evaluating OrangeHRM as a HR solution and OneCMDB as our ITIL CMDB.  The open source applications allow us to quickly install and evaluate the product, and if the solution is a good fit for our need we can forgo the RFP process and move right on to implementation. 

If you are just getting started looking at the open source market I offer some things to keep in mind:

• Open Source is a service not a commodity.  Support is paramount to reduce risk and you should work with you procurement department to put together concise specifications for support. 
  
• Open Source is not free.  TCO will be dominated by support, learning, training and hardware costs.  Savings can be realized mostly in the implementation and licensing costs
  
•  Use of open source tools and applications can be used as a recruitment tool.  Most college students make use of and are familiar with these tools and will want to work in environments that make use of these technologies.
• As with any project - process analysis and improvement is vital to the success of any open source implementation.

There are a number of conferences available every year.  Some examples are OSCON  (Open Source Convention) and GOSCON (Government Open Systems Conference). 

A good starting point to locate and download open source tools and applications is SourceForge

A good example of an open source solution created in a short amount of time is the Federal IT Dashboard.   This application was created using Drupal and flash in a matter of a few months and brings together data from numerous federal agencies.