Follow the Penguin

 By Kay Ewbank

Is open source software a viable alternative? Kay Ewbank finds out what’s available and what it can offer.

HardCopy Issue: 51 | Found In: Business | Published: 23/02/2011 | Last Revision: 25/02/2011

Open source software (OSS) is the term used for computer software where the source code can be freely viewed and modified by the developer community. The idea is that bugs can be found and fixed quickly, and that multiple vendors can work on the same product. The best-known example of OSS is Linux, originally developed by Linus Torvalds and famous for its penguin mascot (called Tux). Linux is now available commercially from a number of vendors including Red Hat and Novell. Having multiple vendors means that, if you don’t like the way one company is behaving, you can swap to another vendor and still be using essentially the same software. Open source vendors claim this openness results in higher quality and more secure software where problems are identified and fixed quickly. Opponents claim that a dedicated team working on proprietary code can solve problems just as quickly, and often quicker. When open source software first appeared, it was synonymous with free-to-use software. Over time the definition has changed somewhat and nowadays the most popular open source software usually attracts a charge, but the way this works is subtly different from the more common proprietary model. In general with open source, you buy a subscription to the software which runs for a certain amount of time. New and improved versions that are developed during this time will automatically be available to you, and your subscription will give you access to help and support. However the big difference is that, as the term implies, the source code must be freely available to all so that anyone can explore, change, compile and even sell the resulting executable (although they must also make their source code available free of charge).

Red Hat Linux

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux family is perhaps the most trusted of the Linux families, covering environments from desktop to large-scale data centre servers. The server versions provide good scalability and reliability, with features such as virtualisation and support for multi-core processors. Indeed the most recent version can handle up to 4,096 cores or threads per system image and can address up to 64 terabytes of memory. Virtualisation is based on KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), which has been developed from the technology Red Hat acquired when it bought Qumranet. You can have up to 64 virtual processor cores, and there’s a sandbox facility so you can run virtual machines in their own protected environments. Servers come with the usual LAMP set of applications, namely Linux itself, Apache Web server, MySQL database and a Perl development system. The desktop versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is clean and very usable. It comes with OpenOffice for desktop applications and Firefox for browsing. The graphical interface is based on Gnome and is fully customisable. Both desktop and server systems are installed through a graphic interface that offers a choice of pre-configured setups to ease the process. These cover a good range of both older and newer hardware, with options such as power management and graphics chips being well supported.

Novell Open Workgroup Suite

Novell Open Workgroup Suite combines server and desktop operating systems and software and is aimed at smaller organisations who want a complete solution. The suite includes Open Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, GroupWise and OpenOffice. Versions are available that include Novell ZENworks Configuration Management systems management software, ZenWorks Linux Management, and Novell Vibe OnPrem, a personal and team productivity application with collaboration tools such as virtual workspaces and enterprise social software. Open Enterprise Server is the server product that replaces the well known Novell Netware network operating system. Open Enterprise Server is based on Suse Linux Enterprise Server. The server provides support for 64-bit computing, Netware virtualisation, and some impressive storage options including dynamic storage technology that automatically moves data classified as inactive to less expensive storage. Distributed file services can be used to create a single virtual file system that spans multiple machines. Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop provides a graphical desktop operating system with Web browser, email client, desktop search, instant messaging and multimedia support. It is also available as a standalone product. The suite comes with OpenOffice Novell Edition, providing similar facilities to those described for Oracle OpenOffice (see below). GroupWise is also included so business users can collaborate from a ‘personal productivity dashboard’ where they can see contacts, emails, and calendars. The users and mailboxes are managed from the Groupwise server application.

MySQL Enterprise

MySQL is probably the best known open source database, and gained a lot of its popularity from the fact it is available in a free-to-use version. While this is still available, there is also a paid-for version called MySQL Enterprise that adds various options to make the product easier to use and administer. MySQL received a lot of concern when it was bought by Oracle in 2009, but so far Oracle has continued with previously announced plans for MySQL, releasing a new version last May. MySQL Enterprise Edition is a full server database with features such as support for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) including commit and rollback and row level locking. You can partition larger databases, back up your database while it is in use, and make incremental and partial backups. There’s a query analyser that monitors the performance of queries and makes suggestions on how to improve the performance. MySQL Workbench is one of the advantages offered by the commercial version. This is a unified graphical environment where you can carry out database, user and server administration, as well as data modelling and SQL development.

The major improvement to the most recent version is MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.2, which is where the query performance monitoring tools have been added. Other improvements are a general revamping of query performance, better security, and integration with MySQL Support where you can get advice and support for the development, deployment and management of MySQL applications.

Oracle OpenOffice

Oracle OpenOffice is the open source office suite that used to be called Star Office. It was acquired by Oracle as part of its buy-out of Sun Microsystems, and is available in a commercial version that includes word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, database, drawing and a mathematical formula editor. It is based on the open documents format (ODF), is compatible with Microsoft Office, and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. The word processor, called Writer, is fully featured with facilities such as spellchecking, thesaurus, auto-correct and auto-complete. You can create, import and export to most file formats including Microsoft Office and PDFs, and the fonts are equivalent in size to those in Microsoft Word so that it’s possible to create and view on similar layouts. The spreadsheet and presentation packages are also good enough for most people’s everyday needs, and depending on the version you choose you benefit from a range of connectors for applications such as SharePoint, MySQL, and Oracle’s E-Business Suite and Business Intelligence Server. Against these benefits you need to bear in mind the fact that Oracle seems to be mainly concentrating on developing Oracle Cloud Office, an online package still under development. While this will use the same file format, it will be based on different code. You also need to consider the fact that some of the OpenOffice community have decided to stop working on OpenOffice and are instead creating an alternative version of OpenOffice called LibreOffice which has received support from Google, Red Hat and Novell.

Ingres Database

Ingres started life open source when it was developed as a database server at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s. It was acquired by Computer Associates and then released as open source. Ingres provides the features necessary to support high-volume online transaction processing such as rollback and commit and row level locking. Other benefits include online backup, point in time restore, support for roles and role separation. Recent versions have added features designed to allow easy migration from other databases, particularly MySQL. These include multi-version concurrency control that lets developers provide concurrent access to the database or a ‘snapshot’ version for each user to work with. This means that running one query will never block other users, and updates block only when changing the same row. In addition, new SQL types and functions have been added so MySQL applications can be ported, and a community-based Migration Toolkit can be used to help in the migration. The latest release has a number of performance enhancements. Bulk loading data is more efficient, as are queries on partitioned tables. There’s also the option to carry out dynamic partition pruning during query processing. Security has also been strengthened with the option of column encryption capabilities that were driven by the Ingres community and completed by Ingres. Column encryption enables database administrators to secure specific fields in a record such as credit card numbers, social security numbers or personal identification (PIN) numbers.

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