Enterprise open source Toolkit

French opt for laissez-faire Linux

Ingrid Marson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 09 Nov 2005 11:30 GMT

...dependent on any vendor — we received three proposals based on JBoss [for the original tender] — one was based on JBoss providing support, two were without JBoss as a subcontractor," says Lapeyre.

Modify the code
The fact that the tax agency can access and modify the source code of open source software is also useful, as it can fix problems or add features in-house, rather than waiting for a vendor update.

"It's good that if we want we can make a modification or fix software. For example, Nagios [an open source host, service and network monitoring program] had a bug in it and we didn't have support from anyone, so two of our engineers fixed it. But, if we go to a [proprietary] vendor like Microsoft and say we have a problem, their answer is to switch to the next version," he says.

As for the downsides of open source, Lapeyre says that in the past the main disadvantage was the lack of commercial support, but this is no longer a problem. "There is [still] a perception that this is a problem, but this is no longer valid. There was no market for [commercial] open source support two years ago, but this is no longer the case," he explains.

Support no longer an issue
The tax agency has supported its open source products in-house in the past, but is now contracting it to external companies to ensure quality of service across the board.

"The contractors make a barrier between me and the complexity of the open source community. Today, I can contact the open source community if I want support, but there's no engagement or commitment. Contractors provide that commitment and manage the community and smaller companies that provide the support," says Lapeyre.

One of the first major deployments of open source software by the agency was back in 2000, when it deployed 850 servers to run an application that manages income tax. The agency is now running around 4000 Linux servers, the majority of which are running a variant of the Red Hat distribution. However Lapeyre claims Red Hat is not being used to support the product as another provider submitted a more competitive tender. "We don't pay Red Hat a cent," he says.

Mission-critical
A few years after its mission-critical Linux deployment, the agency decided to standardise on JBoss, after a proposal based on the open source application server was ranked highest out of a number of tenders, including tenders from the proprietary vendors BEA, IBM and Oracle, according to Lapeyre. The contract, which was signed with services company ATOS Origin and uses JBoss as a subcontractor, is worth "several million euros", he says.

From 2004, every new project in the tax agency that requires an application server must use JBoss and legacy applications must be migrated to the open source application server when possible, says Lapeyre. Already, almost every front-end system in the tax agency is running on JBoss and a mission-critical online tax declaration system was migrated to the application server in August.

The tax declaration system, which is the biggest system run by the agency, was used by 3.8 million people this year. As tax declarations are due at the same time, the system receives the majority of its traffic over just over a month, receiving 5 billion hits during this period in 2005. Although JBoss was deployed after the peak period, it will need to handle the performance requirement next year.

After its positive experience with JBoss, the tax agency decided to mandate the use of open source across the organisation. "Since 2000, we have considered open source on the same criteria as proprietary products. We switched our policy in 2004 because of...

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