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Free and Inexpensive making headway in business

August 19th, 2002

It’s heartening to see this Bloomberg Article about open source databases gaining acceptance in companies and government. While it’s true that MySQL doesn’t meet advanced needs, there are a whole buncha wasted dollars going towards Oracle and MS-SQL licenses where MySQL would more than suffice.

I’d also like companies and government to discover the remarkable value to be had from inexpensive and free content management systems like PostNuke, Drupal, SlashCode, PMachine, Radio, and many others. Many, many projects can benefit from the kind of knowledge sharing these tools provide without having to break the bank.

Using these tools, content management systems comparable to those which just a few years ago would cost scores of thousands of dollars in licensing and hardware even before the consulting fees to implement them can now be built in mere days on lean hardware with little or no licensing fees.

3 comments to “Free and Inexpensive making headway in business”

  1. The problem for me at work is, it’s not easy getting things like that approved for use. Course, if there was a good ASP based klogger, I could probably use it without anyone noticing…

         by rick August 20th, 2002 at 10:50 am

  2. There’s almost no need to tell them it’s not ASP. You can easily run PHP via ISAPI or CGI under IIS and serve up ASP intermixed with PHP. But I’m sure their issue is that they can find dime-a-dozen coders for VBScript. Of course, they’ll find dozens of nine-to-fivers who don’t give a flying fuck about programming beyond the paycheck. The ones who are really passionate innovative types graduated to more flexible things like PHP long ago.

         by brent August 21st, 2002 at 12:28 am

  3. Coincidently, I have written someting about this as well. I am starting a collaborative site for owners of small IT shops. I still have to register the domain name (CollaborateIT.org). At your recomendation, I tried Drupal and it is great. Hands on work has been fun. Here is my initial start (www.bsharp.com/drupal), but I will pass my URL onto others when I get Bsharp out of the URL.
    You won’t mind if I reference the Bloomberg article as well?

         by vijit August 23rd, 2002 at 12:13 am