Dear Open Source, We'd just like to give you a lovely big, warm hug from everyone in the team. We <3 you Open Source! Yours truly Chris Jones Architecture team leader Architecture and Implementation department Shropshire Council
Open Source is brilliant.
Open Source allows us to create fantastic products for our customers, at little to no cost. Here at Shropshire Council, we use Open Source quite a lot. Let me tell you about all the things we're using and how it's helping to reduce our costs.
- This blog, WordPress; Free. Hosted internally on a VM farm, running on Linux.
- The search engine which powers our internet and intranet sites was developed in house, using Java running under Tomcat and Linux. PostgreSQL for data storage; Free.
- Our telephone directory also uses our search engine; so it's free too.
- Our address searching system used by many applications throughout the Council (e.g. Waste collection day finder as an example) was built using the same search engine, and uses an NLPG dataset stored on PostgreSQL. This system is also free (bar the cost of the NLPG dataset itself.)
- We use Apache HTTPD servers to route our application traffic, load balancing and to provide secure access without having to double up on servers for internal and external views; Runs under Linux; Free.
- The presentation framework that we build many of our UIs with is called JSC. It was developed by Chris Ellis; It's Java; It's free.
- The messaging hub/integration platform that sits in the background which takes XML messages from lots of our core systems, and passes them on to others (we call it ARIS), was also built in-house; using Java; under Tomcat and Linux. Also free.
- We use the free IDEs Eclipse and Netbeans for developing our Java apps.
- Our web application testing tool-kit Selenium; Open Source; Free
- Our issue tracking and project management system; TRAC; Open Source; FREEEEE.
- Our source code management repository; SVN; Open Source ;-)
- Our repository manager; Maven; Open Source.
- Our configuration manager, Puppet. Free.
Maybe you can see then that we really, really like Open Source here. we just can't get enough of it.
It's hard to quantify how much all this (and much more which I can't go into now) saves us; But our search engine alone saves us around £40,000-80,000 a year.
Using PostgreSQL as our databases for storing our data saves us from paying for Oracle or SQL Server licences, while providing us equal performance. We use Linux on 18 servers (and growing), which removes the traditional license costs associated with other operating systems.
We still use a lot of non-Open Source products, it's unavoidable, but every problem we encounter we always look for an Open Source solution. Not all of those problems can be so easily solved, and some decisions are out of our hands, but we are committed to reducing costs as much as we can; where we can.
Someday soon I hope that we can give you a more complete run down of the actual costs we're saving, so that you can verify with your own peepers.