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InformationWeek's Cover Story: Open Source Goes Corporate

Posted by tadelste on · 5 comments
Lxer; By Tom Adelstein
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With a big penguin dressed in a power suite and tie, pocketing a Blackberry and holding a cell phone to his ear, InformationWeek (Sept. 26, 2005) writes "Hey, Yahoo, Disney's on the other line. Call you back." And below that, the lead says, "Open-source software, led by Linux, is barreling into big business. P. 38"

Not bad for the print friendly Microsoft publication.

Each week I receive my copy of InformationWeek and muddle through the articles about Microsoft this and Microsoft that. But today, I had the great pleasure of seeing a cover story exalting Linux and open-source. I couldn't find the materials on the Web, so for now, we'll just review Infoweek's print edition.



Larry Greenemeier, did an outstanding job writing about Linux and open-source. He profiled ten large companies using Linux. They included ABN Marco Bank NV, Cedent Corp., Continental Airlines, E-Trade Financial Corp, Fidelity Investments, Nielsen Media Research, Sabre Holdings Corp., UPS Inc., The Walt Disney Company and Yahoo Inc.



Larry starts the article by writing:



One line of code at a time, application by application, web server by web server, the data centers of a growing number of major companies are taking on a new personality, one that smells of the ocean and waddles when it walks.



Shortly after that, he demonstrates a dry-sided sense of humor with this:



If you missed the announcement of this industry-changing development, that's because it never went out. The deployment of open-source software is happening a project at a time, and many of them are never publicly discussed.


So, Larry and team when out to ten big companies and found out for themselves. They came back with an impressive story, well worth the read.



In a way, InformationWeek made the announcement that never went out, by putting that Penguin on its cover along with a street sign that looks like Wall and Broad. Thanks guys!

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Comments (5)

Nice pic

It's on their website now, with a big image of the cover: http://i.cmpnet.com/infoweek/fullcov.jpg.
I got my InformationWeek earlier this week.... it is definitely a recommended article. Talks about companies like ABN Amro Bank, Cendant (duh), Continental Airlines, e-Trade, Fidelity Investments, Nielsen Media Research, Sabre (Travel svcs), UPS, Disney and Yahoo. I won't spill the beans here, but the article tells you about how many of these are converting LARGE portions of their infrastructure over to Linux. Very impressive article.

After many bad experiences with FedEx, I'm glad I use UPS now.

That's my experience...

I've been working in a big corporate shop lately, and FOSS has arrived as needed...perl, apache, gcc, libxml2, MySQL, a high-availability linux cluster...

I just realized something.

The one thing we seem to be missing is the most common back-door Linux app in corporate environments: Samba.

Go figure.
Good to see you wiped all those damned windows machines (j/k). One day samba won't be needed.

Links for Open Source Goes Corporate

Here is the article, linked from LWN: http://lwn.net/Articles/153095

I have to agree with the two comments at LWN. There are a lot of conflicting and/or misleading tensions in the article. Still, it's a fairly glowing introduction for non-techies, and will hopefully lead still more folks to consider that their options are wider than they used to be.

The sidebar "Check Out These Open-Source Web Sites" with a small and not unreasonable list of sites for new folks new check out. (I would preferred to see LXer or LWN instead of sourceforge, but that's OK.)

Also, there's an LXer link already to this related blog http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2005/09/wh... but I thought it might be good to include the link to it here, too.

-james.

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