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State of the nation

Posted on 28 Jan 2009 at 15:59

Simon Brock looks at the future of open-source software in light of the economic downturn, but warns that not all free solutions are best.

Every so often I'm invited to speak at an IT conference, and when that happens it tends not to be an invitation to discuss my company's products and services, but rather to speak about some more general topic. Yesterday's conference was a typical example, where I gave a talk on how you could optimise your web presence. I led my audience in what I hope was an interesting ramble through this subject, by talking about page design, search engine optimisation and the like. I managed to bring up the excellent SEO rapper videos, and a screenshot I'd taken of Google not working properly. To provide a link to the other conference talks, I also spoke about application services on the web such as Google Apps and Salesforce.com. In the pub afterwards I got into discussion with a deputy editor (who shall remain nameless) of a business IT magazine (which shall also remain nameless) about open source and how people perceived and used it. That conversation prompted me to abandon what I was then writing for this particular column and to write instead about the state of open source.

My motive for making this sudden switch was the sheer number of people at the conference who had claimed that open-source software has transformed their lives, and how over the next few months open source will become important to others. The reason for this phenomenon isn't too hard to track down - we're entering a recession and open-source software is free. Although this column is written a month or so before the magazine hits the newsstand, I'm reasonably certain that by the time it does we'll indeed be deeper into economic downturn, and as someone who owns a small company this worries me - but everything I see and hear tells me that it equally worries all sizes of organisation.

Whenever there's a downturn in the economy, organisations start looking to save money, and whenever people look to save money, open source looks like a useful way of doing it. After all, open-source software is free, and free has got to be cheaper than something you pay for, hasn't it? You don't need a Harvard MBA to tell you that this may be the start of a fallacious argument. Just because the initial cost of a system is zero that doesn't mean that its lifetime cost - or Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as management consultants call it - is going to be zero, too. Calculating the TCO for a system is an extremely complicated matter, and it's often easier to work out what the TCO would be for some different system and then decide whether that's likely to be more or less than you're spending now.

To illustrate that tack, here's an example of something we're going to try. A topic we've discussed often over the past few years is open-source solutions for email. The sendmail email transport server was one of the first-ever pieces of open source, and over the years there have been many others such as Exim, Postfix and ZMailer. In terms of mailbox servers, every Linux system comes bundled with a collection of options from simple POP servers through to sophisticated IMAP servers such as Cyrus and Dovecot. And all of them can be linked up with the open-source SpamAssassin spam filter and the open-source virus scanner ClamAV (I've written about all these products in this column over the past few years).

My company's email system is based around all of these technologies. Since we have two hosting centres we use a pair of mailbox servers, one in each centre, and there's a failover system based on heartbeat and using the Disaster Recovery Block Device (www.drbd.org) to mirror files. Of course, each machine also has mirrored disk drives and twin power supplies. We use Cyrus as an IMAP/POP server for our Outlook, Thunderbird and various other mail clients, and there's a web interface based around Horde (www.horde.org) that gives us access to the mail filters built into Cyrus. All this means that when mail arrives it can be filtered into the correct mailbox. We use Postfix to receive incoming mail, and this then gets piped through MailScanner (www.mailscanner.info), which uses SpamAssassin and ClamAV to clean it up. Finally, we use web-cyradm to administer all our mailboxes.