When you book an airline ticket, you use FOSS

This article on ReadWriteWeb really caught my eye today.

From my previous life in data and telecoms I know a little of the scale of the Sabre network. It’s BIG. By the sounds of things most of it runs on Open Source software too. They have announced a partnership with a commercial Open Source vendor Progress to use a number of their FUSE Open Source products.

By default, Sabre only chooses off-the-shelf software as its last option if when no open-source solution is available. If there is neither an open-source nor an off-the-shelf solution, Sabre’s own technology team will provide an in-house solution.

Sabre, as Progress’s Debbie Moynihan proudly pointed out to us, can’t afford any downtime – and FUSE’s Supplier-Side Gateway, which currently handles about 1.5 million transaction a day, has now run on Sabre’s system for 14 months without any error.

Besides FUSE’s offerings, which are based on Apache products, Sabre also extensively uses Apache’s web server, MySQL, Hibernate, Terracotta and a number of other open source products. Also, two-thirds of Sabre’s 5000 servers currently run Linux and the company expects to expand this number over time.

Nice figures. Good story.

It’s when I hear about these really massive and important networks that can’t really go down using FOSS because it works and works well that I really wonder why uptake across the whole enterprise space is so shockingly small in comparison. And then I remember why I think it is so.

The Huge Marketing Budgets of one or two proprietary vendors. But, you know what. I think the times they are a changing….

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