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Re: LAMP is practical model?

by samizdat (Vicar)
on Dec 01, 2005 at 13:14 UTC ( [id://513259]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to LAMP is practical model?

With the caveat up front that I'm actually talking about a BAMP model...

My company has been working for five years to brew a customer-deployable Internet recruiting system. Our prototype, CPGjoblist, has been in operation since August, 2002. It's now an incorporated company and making a profit while expanding. We're just about ready to start selling both the system and some of its modules (like the newsletter generator) to the business world, both as standalone business enablers and as adjuncts to corporate web systems.

I and my developers (3+) use FreeBSD desktops almost exclusively, and our servers are all FreeBSD/Apache/MySQL. The software is written in a mix of PHP, Perl and C Apache modules, with some shell scripts in the mix as well for database replication, and DNS and other system control.

I can't, unfortunately, say that we use exclusively open source. We don't use accounting software that's on BSD for the simple reason that we don't want to spend the time to pay our fractional-time bookkeeper and once-a-year accountant to learn to use it, and nothing is Quickbooks-compatible, so they'd have to come to my office (which we no longer maintain) to work. I also need a testing machine for IE compatibility, as well.

I want to make a point that some Stallman advocates won't want to hear, but is very valid. A business needs to make decisions based on what's good for the company NOW, not what's good for the world maybe someday. I know OOo is good enough by itself, but I still have problems sometimes going back and forth, especially when the doc has pictures embedded in it (some of which bugs are on the MS side!). It is cheaper in terms of my time to just walk over to the Doze box and read the @#$!! thing.

That said, there are a huge number of plusses to designing your business around (B|L)AMP and the open source development model. Bugs do get fixed if you screw up your courage enough to find the developers. My guys have submitted several fixes that are in Apache now, for example. Yes, the web/database portion is the most well-developed arena to play in in this sense, but there are many, many niches which are still wide open for new ventures. We've chosen two, Internet recruiting and web/e-mailed newsletters, but there are lots more out there that do not require getting bogged down in technology development.

The best course, I think, is to concentrate first on building a successful business around a (B|L)AMP server/app stack, and then, when you're in the black and need a place to sink your profits, THEN see how you can become completely Doze-free as well as contributing back to the community. The first part of that is hard enough, believe me, and we're still not there yet. The open source world will still be there five years from now when we are beyond needing to spend every dime on development and marketing, and my contribution will be much the greater because I wait rather than wasting my efforts on being a hard-line evangelist now.

Don Wilde
"There's more than one level to any answer."

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