Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems

My colleague Peter just sent me some links to some great stories about the business benefits of blogging. This after I just yesterday gave a presentation about online marketing, highlighting the value of blogs for business. This story by Wayne Hurlbert at Global PR Blog Week is a great introduction to blogging for business: Blogs As A Website Promotional Tool. Ed Krimen writes about how surprised Macromedia was at the response to their employee’s blogs. Finally, Daniel Lemire engages in a cross-blog discussion about blogging. Follow the links there to see how blogs have enabled a new form of communication, where anyone can be consumer, publisher, or both at the same time.

Newsforge is running a review of the Mambo content management system. Mambo has gotten a lot of attention since winning an award at the Linux World convention in Boston last month.

Mambo is great for small business use, though we wish it used the Smarty template system instead of its own… read the review at NewsForge | Open source Mambo CMS succeeds admirably.

I’ve used Mandrake Multi-Network Firewall (MNF) as a firewall for a couple of clients. Just yesterday I had to reinstall it when the hard drive of the firewall failed after a client moved their office. While the web interface is a bit buggy, what you can do with this firewall is pretty astonishing, and a new version is coming out soon.

A couple of tips if you want to install this firewall:

1. Get it running first, before you try to do anything fancy like add additional public interfaces.
2. Reset (or at least check) the password aging policies on the server, before your password expires. It’s set to expire after 60 days, but this hardened firewall can easily run for months before you bother to log in and check it. It’s easy to get completely locked out…

Flexbeta has an article on turning a normal Mandrake installation into an MNF: Flexbeta - Setting up Mandrake 10.1 as a Firewall.

The Age has (yet another) story about businesses moving to open source software, starting with Firefox. Firefox explorers.

Just found a site that provides a feature comparison for several dozen content management systems of various types, both proprietary and open source. Search for the features you need, and this will show what’s available. Not found on this list are some wiki engines, ERP systems, CRM systems, or document management–but these are some of the features you can select from the list to narrow down on a content management system. The CMS Matrix - Content Management Comparison Tool.

This isn’t exactly new, but apparently it’s news. A popular rapper, Chuck D, has decided to release an album under a Creative Commons license, which specifically gives people permission to reuse the work in other works. He’s doing it because of the results he got from a song he released several months ago under the license. Read more at MSNBC - Rewriting the rules of copyright.

Over in Boston, not having clear ownership rights to the source code installed to manage traffic in the systems put in place in The Big Dig has cost the project an extra $10 million dollars, when the original vendor took them to court. Open Source licenses completely avoid these types of issues, because you, as the user of the software, have the right to share, extend, and redistribute the code without paying additional fees. Read more at: Software Ownership Battle Adds $10M to Cost of ‘Big Dig’ - Computerworld.

The Win-tel duopoly is about to become obsolete? An interesting editorial on the Enterprise Linux I.T. site claims that IBM and Sony are working together on a completely new processor architecture that’s going to deliver supercomputer power to a single chip, putting a grid network into your desktop box. And with its extreme adaptabillity to different computing architecture, it’s Linux that’ll be used there first.

According to the editorial by Paul Murphy, Microsoft is too dependent on the Intel architecture to be able to make the transition, and will soon come to be seen as stalling out.

Linux Reality Outstrips Linux Myth.