NCTC IT Professionals' ForumOctober 2006

Webmail.us' Open Source Software Strategy

Bill BoebelChief Technology Officer

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

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

Reasons we use Open Source

6

Reasons we use Open Source

• 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

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

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

Reasons we use Open Source

• We can become experts at the software

Most Important

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

Some Open Source apps have good vendor support

12

Open Source examples at Webmail

(without patching...)

Web Apache, lighttpd (“Lighty”)

SMTP Postfix

Database MySQL, Berkeley DB, OpenLDAP, memcached

DNS Tinydns, dnscache, rbldnsd

Monitoring Nagios, nmap, syslog-ng

Firewall /Load Bal.

iptables, keepalived, pound, dovecot-proxy

And numerous utilities and programming tools

DRBD, heartbeat, MySQL replicationData Mirroring

Anti-spam / Anti-virus

Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, ClamAV

13

Open Source examples at Webmail

(heavily patched...)

Webmail SquirrelMailno longer used – replaced with homegrown PHP software

IMAP Dovecotbug fixes, integrated Lucene search, modified to mimic previous IMAP software

Search Luceneused API as framework for email indexing/search

Anti-spam Policydadded really cool blacklist/whitelist/greylist features

14

Open Source examples at Webmail

(on the desktop too...)

Office OpenOffice (docs, spreadsheets, presentations)

Browser Firefox

Email Thunderbird

IM GAIM

Linux OS Ubuntu

Anti-virus ClamWin

Tools PuTTY, VMware

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

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

Lessons Learned

But... Keep things simple.

If it breaks, know how to fix it.

Note to self: tell them about DRBD

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

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

Q & A

Bill BoebelCTOWebmail.us Inc.

21

Thank You!

Bill BoebelCTOWebmail.us Inc.

Slides available at:http://billboebel.typepad.com/slides/nctc-2006-10-06.ppt