CIO published an article highlighting 5 cheap (or free) software that can be afforded during financial crisis. Their recommendations are:

• Open Office ($0) instead of Microsoft Office ($110 for basic version)
• Mozilla Thunderbird ($0) instead of Microsoft Outlook (lots of security issues)
• GnuCash ($0) instead of Quicken ($30 for starter edition)
• Alfresco ($0) instead of Sharepoint ($5K for five licenses)
• Linux instead of Windows (non-zero cost, always virus-prone ;)

All the recommendations are open source and can be downloaded and used without any hidden clauses. In all cases the open source version is at par and sometimes better than the commercial version. And of course there is always the agility factor. You enounter a bug, somebody in the community fixes it (on priority if you have support subscription), patch available in the nightly and you are back in business.

Here are some more recommendations ...

• GlassFish instead of Oracle Weblogic or IBM Websphere
• MySQL instead of Oracle Enterprise or IBM DB2
• OpenSolaris instead of Windows
• NetBeans instead of IntelliJ
• VirtualBox instead of VM Ware or any other virtualization software
• and many more here

All these options are completely open source with a full enterprise support available from Sun Microsystems.

Now some actual price comparisons using GlassFish and MySQL Unlimited ...



That's $3 million savings over a period of 3 years!!!

And if the number of sockets/cores go up, that's just additional money you are wasting during this financial crisis. With GlassFish Enterprise Unlimited starting at $25,000 - no counting cores, sockets, support incidents, servers or auditing - you can deploy unlimited GlassFish instances for the same price charged for one WebLogic Enterprise Edition. GlassFish for Business explains the value of buying subscription for your deployments.

Here is another comparison for Total Cost of Ownership for MySQL compared with other databases:



Can your apps scale more than Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Wikipedia ? All these sites are powered by MySQL. Do they need to be more reliable than telco vendors such as Vodafone ? Again powered by MySQL.

In an open source world, why have a "30-day" evaluation period ?

In the times of financial crisis, why spend extra money when there are other better options available with HUGE savings ?

Open Source software is indeed a great way to cut costs. And Sun Microsystems offer a wide varitey of open source offerings (GlassFish, MySQL, OpenSolaris, VirutalBox, Linux, NetBeans and many others) that can help you during this financial crisis!

Technorati: opensource glassfish mysql netbeans opensolaris sun