Gadgetopia

CIO Magazine has published a suprisingly rosy article on the virtues of open source in IT shops. Interesting arguments for open source from a business perspective, along with a number of case studies.

What Alberg finds fascinating about moving to open source is the performance improvement that resulted. The move to Linux, for example, dramatically cut the rate of server failure experienced by the company. Typically, under NT, one of the company’s servers would fail each working day. Now, he says, “we get at most two failures a month&emdash;and often don’t get any in a month.”

For all of the articles I’ve read like this, I’ve yet to see one with the opposite view, that is, firms that have gone open source but then found it unworkable and gone back to proprietary platforms. If you find any, let me know!