This document discusses open source software and its adoption, as well as examples of open source projects that have been ported to work with Informix databases. It notes that open source adoption is increasing among organizations and governments. It provides definitions of open source and examples of successful open source products, both non-commercial and commercial. Specific open source projects that have been ported to Informix are discussed, as well as current and potential porting projects. The document encourages getting more volunteers involved in porting efforts and working with partners and commercial vendors.

1. Open Source and Informix
Jacques Roy
jacquesr@us.ibm.com>>
December 1, 2010 © 2010 IBM Corporation

2. Why is Open Source Important?
“According to a survey by Accenture, more than two-thirds of organizations
anticipate increasing their investment in it this year, and almost 40% said that
they expect to migrate mission-critical software to open source within the
next 12 months.”
Readwrite Enterprise, June 24, 2010
“The UK Government is accelerating the use
of open source in schools, government
departments and public services by making
sure that open source is considered . . .”
“Vietnam has a goal of migrating government
software to open source by the end of 2010.”
“Munich, Germany is making extensive use of open source software on
municipal PCs, including Thunderbird and Open Office.”
“The United States has made a number of recent moves toward open source:
the whitehouse.gov move to Drupal, the memo from the Department of
Defense (DoD): Clarifying Guidance on Open Source Software, and more.”
Open Source Adoption in Worldwide Governments
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2010/01/19/open-source-adoption-in-worldwide-governments/
2 © 2010 IBM Corporation

3. Definition
“Open source describes practices in production and
development that promote access to the end product's source
materials—typically, their source code”
- Wikipedia
Free ?
Use of volunteers, donations
Support by companies like IBM
Fee support, licensing
Need to distinguish between:
Free open source software
Commercial open source software
3 © 2010 IBM Corporation

4. Successful Open Source Products
Linux
Originally written by Linus Torvalds in 1991
IDS ran on Linux in 1998 (7.30.UC5)
Apache Software Foundation (73 projects)
A patchy http server
Geronimo, Tomcat, Lucene, iBatis
Eclipse (Started as an IBM Canada project)
Eclipse Foundation created in 2004
Hibernate (Java object relational mapping)
Development supervised by Redhat/JBoss
Social networking products: Mediawiki, Drupal, Joomla!, etc.
Other
Dojo, Hadoop
4 © 2010 IBM Corporation

5. Commercial Open Source Examples
Alfresco (Enterprise Content Management)
Uses Hibernate, moving to iBatis
Lotus Symphony?, Open Office
Office productivity suite (document, presentation, spreadsheet)
Multiple flavors of Linux
RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, etc.
Sugar CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Open Source support for MySQL, SQL Server
Mono
Open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET application framework
Databases
MySQL, Ingres, BerkeleyDB, etc.
5 © 2010 IBM Corporation

6. Not Open source but...
IBM Data Studio
Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Can be used for Informix stored procedures debugging
Bundled with Informix (11.70) media
IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WASCE)
Used Apache Tomcat and Geronimo
Free download. Fee-based support available by IBM
6 © 2010 IBM Corporation

7. Open Source and Informix
Mediawiki (PHP)
W iki engine behind W ikipedia
Ported to Informix on version 1.15.x – Done first half of 2010
Current version 1.16.0 (July 28, 2010)
Hibernate (Java)
Persistence layer, object to relational mapping
Updated dialect, changes to some code
Code changes not needed with Informix 11.70
Drupal (PHP)
Content management platform, community, blog software
Version 6.16 working with Informix
www.briug.org runs Drupal on Informix
Xwiki (Java)
Second-generation wiki, allows scripting in pages
7 © 2010 IBM Corporation

8. Current Projects
Alfresco
Enterprise content management
Being worked on by More Data (sergio@moredata.pt)
Bugzilla
Bug tracking system written in Perl
Port in progress
DDLUtils
Convert DDL from one vendor to another
Assigned to a volunteer
Pentaho
Business intelligence tool
Port completion expected soon
Zabbix
System monitoring tool
Port in progress for version 1.8.4rc2
8 © 2010 IBM Corporation

9. Potential Projects
Atlasian
Jira: project and issue tracking
Confluence: wikis, collaboration
SugarCRM
Customer Relationship Management
Jahia
W eb content integration
9 © 2010 IBM Corporation

10. Where to find out: www.iiug.org/opensource
10 © 2010 IBM Corporation

11. Open Source: What's Next?
Get more volunteers
Do you want to participate?
Work with partners
Work with commercial open source vendors
Work on contribution
Work on specific open-source products
Based on demand/opportunities
11 © 2010 IBM Corporation