4 - Five Immediate Open Source Opportunities

Abstract

This chapter discusses five immediate open source opportunities that can be implemented in an organization. First is to create an open source lab and use it as a base to review and publicize open source activity for evaluating and testing the solutions. The lab should deploy the Linux distributions and other software on which one would like to standardize. Infrastructure servers to open source using a combination of Samba on Linux servers and network-attached storage appliances can be migrated. This saves money on client licensing and simplifies management. The choice between using Samba 3 to support Active Directory or consider deploying OpenLDAP as a replacement for or alongside the closed source directory has to be decided when faced with directory-based security needs.. One or more LAMP applications can be built. This tool set speeds and simplifies development and can save money. There is a chance for opening up of opportunities for solutions that was not possible before. Applications and databases can migrate from other operating systems, such as UNIX and Novell, to Linux and one or two standardized databases. This simplifies system and application management and takes out some old recurring costs.