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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Operating Systems
& Middleware:
Open Source Ushers In New Era In
Indian Computing
At the recently held Mait national conference in Mumbai, India, the topic
of
discussion, "Open Source Software: A New Direction for India?", drew a lot of
attention from vendors and channel alike.
The conference was organized to discuss the use of Open Source Software
(OSS)
in different applications and the benefits of use of OSS in terms of free
source code availability and reduced total cost of ownership.
"Compared to the closed operating systems, OSS is much cheaper and can be
used
in IT architecture in platforms like desktops, Web servers, business logic
servers, database servers and infrastructure servers. Beside this, the free
versions of OSS like Linux can be downloaded for a testing phase," said Gautam
Shroff, head of architecture and technology consulting for TCS.
Shroff further maintained that proprietary software combined with Open
Source
choices yields both low total cost of ownership for users and provides viable
business models for the industry. An interesting concept discussed at the
conference concerned the increasingly popular "LAMP" architecture, which is a
combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl and PHP.
Rajeev V. Kamat, director and program executive for Linux systems at IBM,
said, "Linux as an Open Source is the prime driver of IBM's on-demand
computing vision. People use only 5 to 10 percent of the closed network
system, but the utility of OSS like Linux is sometimes as high as 35
percent."
He also underlined the benefits of using Linux, which include reliability,
performance, acquisition cost and value of OSS. "If the Open Source movement
really gains momentum, the benefits of such low-cost technology would
percolate down to the masses. IBM has introduced a series of products
supporting Linux. We are also conducting training programs to train people on
the use of OSS," added Kamat.
According to Mait, the low cost hardware and high performance output of OSS
will render high utility value to various organizations.
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