Case study: Open source sells bricks and mortar

Will large organisations with mission-critical environments embrace open source instead of commercial alternatives?

Realestate.com.au is a Web site with demanding traffic requirements, serving more than 60 million page views a month.

According to Berkeley Wilson, IT operations manager with realestate.com.au, the company is almost an open source-only show.

“From the OS to the language, our applications are built in open source,†he said.

The company currently uses FreeBSD, Apache, modperl, MySQL, Squid, Perl and gcc and has a production environment “extensively†based on open source software, he said.