1. NCTC IT Professionals' Forum October 2006

2. Webmail.us' Open Source Software Strategy Bill Boebel Chief Technology Officer

3. 3 Webmail.us & Open Source 1. Reasons we use Open Source 2. Open Source is not always the right choice 4. Lessons learned 3. Open Source examples at Webmail

4. 4 First, what is “Open Source?” ● It's a software license (ex: GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache SL) ● Source-code access ● Unrestricted free use ● Anyone can sell, giving away, or modify the software

5. 5 Reasons we use Open Source

6. 6 Release cycle – weeks, not months Developers motivated by a need, not a paycheck You can contribute: code, bug reports, feature requests Better security, and fewer bugs! Fast Innovation

7. 7 Reasons we use Open Source Author can never anticipate every use case Almost does what you need? – patch it Bug? – patch it Security hole? – patch it Need it to integrate with 3 other apps? – patch it Flexibility

8. 8 Reasons we use Open Source No license fee per server, scaling is cheap Many ways to scale, be creative Built your system piecemeal 175 servers at Webmail & growing Scalability

9. 9 Reasons we use Open Source We can become experts at the software Most Important

10. 10 Open Source is not always the right choice ● Don't use Open Source just to save money ● Time investment, rather than dollar investment ● Focus on what is core to your business ● Alternatives: Hosted apps, Vendor supported software ● Desktop apps are another story. We let our employees choose.

11. 11 Some Open Source apps have good vendor support

12. 12 Open Source examples at Webmail (without patching...) Web Apache, lighttpd (“Lighty”) SMTP Postfix DatabaseMySQL, Berkeley DB, OpenLDAP, memcached DNSTinydns, dnscache, rbldnsdMonitoringNagios, nmap, syslog-ng Firewall / Load Bal. iptables, keepalived, pound, dovecot-proxy And numerous utilities and programming tools DRBD, heartbeat, MySQL replication Data Mirroring Anti-spam / Anti-virus Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, ClamAV

13. 13 Open Source examples at Webmail (heavily patched...) Webmail SquirrelMail no longer used – replaced with homegrown PHP software IMAP Dovecot bug fixes, integrated Lucene search, modified to mimic previous IMAP software SearchLucene used API as framework for email indexing/search Anti-spamPolicyd added really cool blacklist/whitelist/greylist features

14. 14 Open Source examples at Webmail (on the desktop too...) Office OpenOffice (docs, spreadsheets, presentations) Browser Firefox EmailThunderbird IMGAIMLinux OSUbuntuAnti-virusClamWinToolsPuTTY, VMware

15. 15 Open Source examples at Webmail The people behind Open Source projects are interesting: ● Sometimes its just one person (Dovecot, amavisd-new) ● Sometimes its a team of 20+ (MySQL, Hadoop)

16. 16 Lessons Learned Pick a project written in a language your people know Join the listserv Dig into the code Don't settle on features of just one app Instead, combine the best features from many different apps When you use Open Source software on your servers: Become an expert

17. 17 Lessons Learned But... Keep things simple. If it breaks, know how to fix it. Note to self: tell them about DRBD

18. 18 Lessons Learned ● Use a version control system such as Subversion (“svn”) ● branch, merge, tag, revert ● Use Trac to view revision history ● Read the svn book: http://svnbook.red-bean.com ● svn is Open Source too If you modify Open Source software...

19. 19 Other forms of “Openness” ● Web 2.0 – hosted applications that expose web service APIs can provide as much flexibility as Open Source software ● Examples: Amazon S3, Salesforce.com, Webmail.us API ● Creative Commons ● Company transparency through blogging

20. 20 Q & A Bill Boebel CTO Webmail.us Inc.

21. 21 Thank You! Bill Boebel CTO Webmail.us Inc. Slides available at: http://billboebel.typepad.com/slides/nctc-2006-10-06.ppt