CIO published an article highlighting 5 cheap (or free) software that can be afforded during financial crisis. Their recommendations are:
- Open Office ($0) instead of Microsoft Office ($110 for basic version)
- Mozilla Thunderbird ($0) instead of Microsoft Outlook (lots of security issues)
- GnuCash ($0) instead of Quicken ($30 for starter edition)
- Alfresco ($0) instead of Sharepoint ($5K for five licenses)
- Linux instead of Windows (non-zero cost, always virus-prone
All the recommendations are open source and can be downloaded and used without any hidden clauses. In all cases the open source version is at par and sometimes better than the commercial version. And of course there is always the agility factor. You enounter a bug, somebody in the community fixes it (on priority if you have support subscription), patch available in the nightly and you are back in business.
Here are some more recommendations …
- GlassFish instead of Oracle Weblogic or IBM Websphere
- MySQL instead of Oracle Enterprise or IBM DB2
- OpenSolaris instead of Windows
- NetBeans instead of IntelliJ
- VirtualBox instead of VM Ware or any other virtualization software
- and many more here
All these options are completely open source with a full enterprise support available from Sun Microsystems.
Now some actual price comparisons using GlassFish and MySQL Unlimited …
That’s $3 million savings over a period of 3 years!!!
And if the number of sockets/cores go up, that’s just additional money you are wasting during this financial crisis. With GlassFish Enterprise Unlimited starting at $25,000 – no counting cores, sockets, support incidents, servers or auditing – you can deploy unlimited GlassFish instances for the same price charged for one WebLogic Enterprise Edition. GlassFish for Business explains the value of buying subscription for your deployments.
Here is another comparison for Total Cost of Ownership for MySQL compared with other databases:
Can your apps scale more than Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Wikipedia ? All these sites are powered by MySQL. Do they need to be more reliable than telco vendors such as Vodafone ? Again powered by MySQL.
In an open source world, why have a “30-day” evaluation period ?
In the times of financial crisis, why spend extra money when there are other better options available with HUGE savings ?
Open Source software is indeed a great way to cut costs. And Sun Microsystems offer a wide varitey of open source offerings (GlassFish, MySQL, OpenSolaris, VirutalBox, Linux, NetBeans and many others) that can help you during this financial crisis!
Technorati: opensource glassfish mysql netbeans opensolaris sun
- OSUM – Open Source University Meetup – awesome venue for students!
- GlassFish and NetBeans at MySQL Users Conference 2009
- JRuby-on-Rails and MySQL on GlassFish on OpenSolaris in Virtual Box VM
- “Sparks of passion” in the “world of Open Source” – Archana N contributes to GlassFish Documentation
- TOTD #65: Windows 7 Beta 1 Build 7000 on Virtual Box: NetBeans + Rails + GlassFish + MySQL
Amazing article, nice time to publish this, as NetBeans celebrates its birthday from today
Comment by Varun — October 20, 2008 @ 5:44 am
I do think that for the most popular open source applications there is an a great benefit from having an active community around the product, because it’s much more likely you’ll find solutions to the problems you run into. For commercial products, googling often turns up little or nothing, so you contstantly have to rely on the vendor to support you, which can have lengthy turn-around times (which can be costly if you’re paying salaries).
However, I do think that people over-estimate how easy it is to get open source applications patched, they too often point at open source success stories and act like that’s the case for all open source projects – believe me, there are thousands of floundering, buggy, supportless, userless open source apps out there.
Comment by Dobes Vandermeer — October 20, 2008 @ 11:52 am
Just wondering , how sun makes money then?
Comment by Anonymous — October 20, 2008 @ 11:43 pm
There is enterprise support available on all these software. Even though you can download, develop and deploy on GlassFish without any charge, but it’s highly recommended to buy support subscription for any production deployment. There are several benefits such as email support, SLA, patches, security updates and others. http://blogs.sun.com/glassfishforbusiness shows the benefits of buying subscription for GlassFish.
Comment by Arun Gupta — October 21, 2008 @ 10:27 am
why dont put eclipse vs Netbeans
eclipse is used by a lot of vendor, and can run almost all container, eclpse is strong also in enterprise
1. SAP Netweaver based on Eclipse
2. Weblogic
3. Websphere
4. JBuilder
5. JBoss Studio
6. also glassfish
Comment by Frans Thamura — January 5, 2009 @ 4:36 pm
article is really good. thank you.
Comment by sinema izle — March 13, 2009 @ 2:16 pm
[Trackback] Here are some quotes from a recent article talking about Oracle’s maintenance and support fees: Before Oracle acquired BEA earlier this year, the company charged 18% to 20% for support and maintenance. Oracle increased those fees to meet its…
Comment by Arun Gupta's Blog — March 24, 2009 @ 8:32 am