Intelius Chief Technology Officer Kevin Marcus has a great post up about why Intelius uses technology built on the LAMP stack.
I just had a great chat with Matt Mullenweg about the amazing applications of open source technology to business. In the past, businesses have been wary of using anything developed in an open source environment because it doesn’t come with the same level of legal accountability and technical support that a proprietary piece of software does.
This can be a deal breaker for a lot of businesses, but for some, Matt and I both agree that the support/accountability issue is trumped by the dedication of passionate communities to problem solving and by the fact that companies can get open source software to jump through hoops that proprietary software will not.
And as Marcus writes:
Yes, commercialization can result in advantages including more robust support and compatibility, (consider the success of RedHat or MySQL), but in my mind, the real benefit to an open source model is overall software quality and flexibility.
Can you imagine the day that email sent from Outlook requires an Outlook browser to read it? If you can imagine the potential implications of a development like that (something like the different formats for different versions of Excel not always being backwards compatible), you might want to look more closely at the design motivation behind your infrastructure.
If the increase in interest in WordPress is any indication, open source blogging platforms appear to be one of the major themes of 2007. Surely their applications are not limited to non business bloggers. It’s something we definitely plan to discuss at our conference this September.
Many thanks to my colleague and friend Kim Larsen for pointing me in the direction of Marcus’ piece.
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