The Enterprise Open Source Blog

Open Source Benefits: A Developer’s Perspective

Posted by Peter Williams on January 20th, 2012 in Open Source Trends

Open source benefits to businesses are pretty obvious, even if only recently recognized. It costs less, and often works better, than its commercial competitors. Developers have long preferred open source products to their commercial counterparts. In fact, this developer preference is why we are seeing the surge in enterprise open source usage. Why do developers prefer open source so strongly?

I want it yesterday!
Developers want to get stuff done. The thought of engaging in a procurement process is enough to sap the energy from almost any idea. We will just go back to reading hacker news instead of slogging our way through all that red tape.

Open source tools, on the other hand, are always close at hand. It takes almost no time from conception to actually writing code if you are using open source tools. Even better you can wait until you have something interesting to demo before you ask for forgiveness. With commercial offerings you almost always have to ask for permission, and we all know that is a sure fire way to get your pet project shut down.

Developing The Cloud Mindset

Posted by Peter Williams on December 16th, 2011 in The Cloud

From the moment I got a real taste of the freedom and flexibility of cloud computing I never wanted to go back. My first experience was more than three years ago at a tiny startup. The idea of cloud computing was pretty novel then, but after that first release I was hooked. I had never noticed before but managing physical hardware is like walking knee deep in water.

Just reading and thinking about the cloud can’t do it justice. On the surface it seems like just yet another way to run your apps. Once you start working with the cloud — particularly the PaaS variety — it’s power to help you get stuff done quickly becomes obvious. Anything that helps get stuff done is worth grabbing onto and exploiting for all it is worth.