Open Sauce Software

Vyatta's open source routers are bubbling away, and have a new deployment, not far away as the packet flies: in Telecity, Amsterdam.

I think open source is a good bet for router software. It doesn't suffer the difficulties of more visible software such as desktop operating systems (user interfaces take lots of hands and eyes to make them, and lots of effort to keep them consistent). It just needs to work well, and have a responsive support company for fixing problems.

The leader in the field - correct me if I'm wrong - seems to be Vyatta. The company is doing all the right things marketing-wise, including selling open source as a recession-buster with a discount offer, going head to head with the competition, and issuing test results that show it beating Cisco,

The company is also gathering good case studies. For instance, Ben King of network designers, Net That Works, has just installed two routers at Telecity in Amsterdam, for IT services and hosting company Danego.

The installation includes a BGP Endpoint for each of Danego's two upstream providers, external firewalling, and internal subnetting and routing, done in a ’router on a stick’ style using VLANs. The whole thing is clustered for failover so it's resilient to failures of switches and routers.

Those routers? It's just Vyatta software running on general purpose Dell hardware provided by the client. King's only problem was when the customer gave him untried new Dell hardware: "Typically we deploy Vyatta on Dell R200s (what were 860s), Danego however managed to get a stunning deal out Dell on 2950s."

Fine, only the new Dells use a different chipset for their RAID controller, and Vyatta didn't like it. It's a known bug, though and Vyatta sent a new version of the software, pronto, when King phoned them. "This is why we love Vyatta," he says.

"Although this is not anything like the biggest Vyatta deployment we have done, I like it because it demonstrates how using HP and Vyatta you can very effectively deliver a relatively complex redundent solution for a fraction of the equivalent Cisco price."

There are pictures here.

I've been hearing that open source vendors will win when the money gets tight. Is this true, or is it just spin?

In the short term, there's no denying that open source companies will suffer, like everyone else. Everyone is so shocked at the powerful downturn meme, that it can look like no-one is buying anything at all (it's true. I've been holding off on buying things like printer paper and toner).

This hits open source vendors. It's been the "most unpleasant quarter I've ever been through," according to Mat Asay of open source content management company Alfresco (quoted in a good article at Linux.com).

Long term, though, people do have to buy things again - but they will be more price conscious. (Yes. I'm printing on the back of documents. When they run out, I'll get more paper, but I won't go for the high-quality stuff).

At that point, open source wins - because it's cheaper in upfront costs. Asay lists three deals where he says Alfresco was up to 90 percent cheaper than proprietary: "One competitor had a $5 million bid, and we won with a $500,000 bid. We won another with a $250,000 bid; and another in Canada, [the bid from the proprietary software company] was well over $1 million, and ours was $100,000."

But there's a big danger. Open source companies make their money on service and support. Customers take the software on evaluation, and are free to use it, then turn it into a commercial deal when they start to rely on it.

The danger is that they will start to rely on "free" software, without going over to commercial support - something that Gartner analyst Mark Driver likens to "driving without insurance".

"In every case with us, and across the board with companies I work with, customers can evaluate a long time before they make a purchasing decision," Asay tells Linux.com. "One Fortune 10 company has been using our product in production for a while without paying us a dime."

But at the moment, most of these companies have a significant strength: long term contracts with customers. The trick now is to get more customers to sign up for this sort of regular business, by undercutting proprietary, and by offering better services.

Red Hat's consulting service promises just this, helping users cut costs by ditching proprietary software.

And developing this sort of thing should be possible. Canonical's Gerry Carr tells Linux.com that a lot of the resources you need to grow your business are going to be cheaper in the downturn.

A survey - dontcha love surveys? - shows that Most Linux distros are running better websites than Microsoft.

Over one month, Microsoft's home page was down for one hour and 19 minutes, according to website monitoring company Pingdom. The survey also looked at 16 Linux distros, as well as Apple - and found that almost all of them did better, with most doing substantially better.

Mandriva, Mint and Arch had more downtime - Arch had a weekend outage - but Fedora, Knoppix, Mopis and Red Hat all had no downtime at all, and CentOS and Ubuntu also came in under Apple's impressive two minutes of downtime in the month.

The story on download times is similar. The HTML on Microsoft's page took just over a second to download, with only three Linux distros (Arch, Gentoo and PCLinuxOS) taking longer, while only four distros (Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu and Damn Small) were less than Apples 448ms.

The figures don't mean a great deal, of course. All the Linux versions have a lot less resources, and have to support a lot less traffic than Microsoft.

Still, the Apple site must have similar levels of traffic to Microsoft, and - on this month's showing - is handling it better.

And I like Pingdom. Last time I looked into one of its surveys, I discovered that Cubans prefer Linux to sex.

There are Chinese web browsers, of course: there are about 250 million Internet users in China. But there's a bit more to the Chinese Firefox than simply a browser that can display Chinese characters.

The new version, just announced includes a new feature: Live Margins.

It's a new sidebar on the right, and apparently it is "a unique solution to the longstanding problem of tab browsing where only one tab is visible at any time". But it also gives "additional search results, relevant information, music, video, and much more," so I'm not that clear what it does. There are screenshots on this Chinese language page.

Whether or not this is a fundamental advance, it is also localised, including information from the Chinese Youtube, and Chinese sites for music and other information.

It's come from Mozilla Online, the Beijing-based Mozilla subsidiary, an outfit headed by an interesting sounding guy. Li Gong has in his time been chief Java security at Sun, before returning to China to head up Sun's research there, and then running Microsoft's MSN in China.

I don't know if we'll see Live Margins in English-language versions of Firefox - maybe it won't read so well with Western reading patterns? - but I think this is a sign of the times. I expect to see more open source form China in future....

Thanks to Glyn Moody for the link.

The open source world isn't all sweetness and light. Novell is trying to take business from the market leader in Linux servers, Red Hat - with a switchover campaign.

As in many such campaigns, Novell is offering incentives to companies that decide to move to its product. The interesting thing is that a major one of those incentives, is short-term technical support for the user's Red Hat operating systems during the switchover.

In anything but open source, that would be a very difficult ptomise to make, points out John Fontana at Network World. Patches for proprietary software are commercial products, just like the software they patch; but there's nothing at all to stop Novell from distributing open source patches to the open source Red Hat operating system.

If nothing else, the move will increase competition and keep Red Hat looking at the terms of its own support contracts.