I like the way open source works. For example, my former colleague and manager started his own company that produces customer support and ticketing software called Helpdesk and one of the challenges he had to solve was building a reliable search system that will allow his users to search through thousands of tickets.

And since we all know that providing a reliable search system is not an easy job, a decision was made to outsource the searching features to IndexTank, a company that provides scaled real-time search. Here’s where the open source part comes in: since there wasn’t any suitable Zend Framework component for integration with IndexTank, Alex decided to write his own and open-source it on Github. It’s really cool and well documented. Deutschland uber alles

Also check out the post on IndexTank’s blog and Helpdesk‘s website.

Whitehouse.gov goes Drupal – this was a headline on all technology blogs. This alone is a huge step for Drupal. It has proved itself and the debates like Drupal vs. Joomla or Drupal vs. WordPress are now over. Buytaert’s followers will just go “yes we can”.

But it’s also a big day for Open Source as a whole since the Whitehouse.gov website runs now on a LAMP solution. And if it’s good enough for the WhiteHouse, then it’s good enough for companies.

Back in the days, Microsoft’s solutions were considered to be the (only) “safe choice” for IT managers to make. Linux servers or open source implementations were considered to be…experimental at best, and that if you want a bullet-proof and reliable infrastructure you should always go with Microsoft. In reality nothing could be further from the truth, as most Microsoft servers I’ve encountered so far were inferior to their Linux/Unix/Macintosh counterparts.

The FUD that Linux and open source are not suitable for big companies or governments has received today a(nother) blow. I consider that this move should be widely imitated by governments in Europe, as it will create jobs here and we won’t spend billions of euros importing software from the US.