Open Source: The 'barometer' points to a strong demand for choice

Alfresco is releasing ‘barometer data’ of what’s going on in the world of Open Source based on their own experience.
Alfresco has seen very rapid adoption in the few years the company has been in existence, now topping 1 million downloads and used by a wide range of organizations like NASA, The Switzerland Supreme Court, Harvard, Christian Science Monitor, H&R Block, McGraw Hill, and others.

Alfresco supports a variety of Operating Systems, Databases, and Application servers.
Alfresco’s Ian Howells contrasted the difference in approach between an Open Source offering like Alfresco versus a commercial product like Microsoft’s SharePoint.  “SharePoint is crystallizing people’s views in choice,” he said. “SharePoint forces you to use Microsoft Windows, SQL Server, .NET and Portal.

And to a certain extent, you’re not going to use OpenOffice with it. And some people like that top-to-bottom stack and some people want to have a choice.
Most of the corporations we talked with — they still want to use Oracle BEA. And it’s making people think, ‘Do I want to be tied into one stack or do I want to have a choice.’ And I think that’s the big thing that’s been happening over the last 12 months, and the next 12 months.”

Alfresco polled 35,000 of their community users and found some interesting trends in Open Source based on how Alfresco is being deployed.
They found that 51 percent of their community is downloading the Windows version of ALfresco, compared to only 30 percent downloading the Linux version.
And part of the reason for the large number of Windows version copies is that many people find it convenient to evaluate the software on their desktop or laptop.  44 percent of those responding say that they test the software on their laptops.  Only 26 percent are deploying their download to a company server.

Among the flavors of Linux, the survey found that Ubuntu is becoming more popular, now accounting for 38 percent of their Linux deployments, while RHEL variants accounted for 35 percent, and only 9 percent were Novell’s SUSE Linux.

60 percent of their installations were MySQL-based; 14 percent were Oracle; 13 percent were Microsoft SQL Server, 9 percent were PostgreSQL, and 2 percent were IBM’s DB2.  70 percent of the deployments used Tomcat and 18 percent were using JBoss.

Formtek is an Alfresco Gold Systems Integration Partner.