Budget issues? Reconsider open source on IBM System i

Mike Pavlak believes that open source has a bright future on the IBM System i platform. The economy is helping.

“Over the years our customers have commented that they are looking at PHP for a number of reasons,” Pavlak, a consultant for Zend Technologies, wrote. “The most common reason we are hearing in 2009 reflects the fact that open source is no longer an option or a luxury but strategic and cost effective…” Pavlak later added that “no cows are sacred in this new economy.”

As Pavlak notes, all branches of the popular open-source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python) are supported on the System i. He added that other open-source software customer relationship management (CRM) application SugarCRM allows you to run business applications for free (as a side note, the Young i Professionals has now made SugarCRM available in its sandbox so you can play around with it).

As Pavlak wrote, “IBM has been moving forward with open source for years. Why shouldn’t you?”

Finally, expect some Zend-related news on the System i in the next week or so.