A Wall Street Journal article "Linux Shoots for Big Leagues" (subscription required) by Chris Lawton discusses how open source continues to make inroads in IT departments. The examples show Linux and open source providing cost savings of 50-90% compared to traditional closed source architectures. That's a pretty compelling number, and likely to get the attention of any CIO who's trying to manage a budget. Lets f A Wall Street Journal article “Linux Shoots for Big Leagues” (subscription required) by Chris Lawton discusses how open source continues to make inroads in IT departments. The examples show Linux and open source providing cost savings of 50-90% compared to traditional closed source architectures. That’s a pretty compelling number, and likely to get the attention of any CIO who’s trying to manage a budget. Lets face it, if you can save money on hardware and software and spend it on people or projects, it’s a no-brainer. But the significance of open source goes beyond just the cost-savings. A more significant benefit is the ability of organizations to easily scale-out their operations rapidly. Open source adoption typically goes hand-in-hand with adoption of a scale-out architecture based on commodity x86 Intel or Opteron servers. This gives companies an ability to easily accomodate growth by adding more servers as opposed to doing a “forklift upgrade“. That’s a common scenario in high-growth companies like Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, Zappos, Booking.com, Zillow or other online businesses. We featured a few of these scale-out examples on the MySQL web site recently, for those who are interested. And as the Wall Street Journal notes, Windows is still ahead of Linux in server adoption. But with the backing of companies like Dell, HP, and IBM, I would expect that Linux still has a lot of growth ahead of it given how much desire there is for companies to scale their operations. Open Source