FOSS keeps us connected

Sam Varghese
Friday, 01 December 2006 04:24

Opinion and Analysis

With five million incoming emails to handle a month, Turner entrusts that task to qmail, a free mail transport agent. "Exchange won't cut it," says the company's chief technical officer, Greg Bader.

Open source packages such as Apache, Nagios - a host, service and network monitoring program - perl, courier IMAP, openLDAP and MySQL are others which are vital to the business.

Within the office, Windows is used. "The corporate network is entirely Windows," says Bader. And there are other areas where commercial offerings are used - for example, the open source package SpamAssassin was thrown out in favour of a proprietary solution. Turner says there was too much manual work involved in keeping SpamAssassin up-to-date.

But it's not just GNU/Linux that keeps the internet going. The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD - are prominently represented when one looks at websites worldwide in terms of uptime. Sun's Solaris operating system, the source for which is now available, is another that is popular with serious network admins.

In developing countries, there are even more compelling reason for using FOSS when it comes to providing internet access. The cost factor simply overrides everything else.