InfoWorld: White Paper: Using Open Source for Profit

Oct 12, 2001, 22:04 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by David A. E. Wall)

[ Thanks to Jeremy Allison for this link. ]

"When it came time to secure the Web servers from intrusion, we looked over a few firewall appliances, but the costs were prohibitive. Fortunately, Linux's ipchains offers a firewall for inbound as well as outbound traffic and even provides for network address translation to allow us to run our application separated from the Internet on a private network behind yet another firewall. Coupled with Tripwire and Snort, which detect unexpected modifications to files and analyze logs for intrusions, turning off all Internet services that are not needed, removing all unneeded user accounts, and ensuring high-quality passwords for the accounts that remain has shown Linux to be very secure and robust.

In the end, the open-source community of developers has been wonderful for our startup. The savings in up-front costs, the highly reliable and feature-rich software, and the excellent support networks allow us to be successful in providing a reasonably priced secure document delivery and e-signature solution to our business clients.

Although we are happy that we can easily run our software on Solaris, iPlanet, Oracle, and BEA for those clients that demand it, we're more than happy with the results we've gotten from the hard work and dedication of many untold open-source contributors."

Complete Story

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