Marco Milani

The new main release of Firebird is coming with a lot of new features, SQL extensions and architectural improvements.

This Open Source Database is one of the best database solution available at this moment. This database engine encapsulates in a FREE solution :

• Rich and powerfull SQL language
• Record versioning (no locks) - Multi generation architecture
• Fully scalable in size from Mb to Tb
• Fully scalable in number of users
• Simple and with small footprint  installation
• Multiplatform server
• Native connection in many languages

If would you like a deeper analysis about why Firebird could be a good deal, take a look at the presentation why-firebird-fact-for-decision-makers.

There are some myths around firebird spread with the aim of hiding the real power of this solution. In the document Firebird_myths these myths are refuted.

I'm an estimator of free applications even in business environment.

Free software and services become more comfortable, more productive, more "standard", more and more professional and they actually permit a successfully application in business environments.
My company uses extensively free software like Firebird, Firefox, Thunderbird, Freemind, Joomla, WordPress, Debian, Lingoes, just to mention some.

Free software is great but "All that glitters isn't gold"! Some threats may break the dream of completely free software.

Changes in licensing
First of all a software that is free today can not be free forever!
A recent example comes from PostBox, a new e-mail client based on thunderbird (wrote by the former thunderbird's developers) originally claimed as "a free e-mail client" and switched to commercial in September once the first stable release appeared and after a lot of users tested the beta versions. In this case the testing of the user was free not the product!
This is not the only case in which the owner changes the licensing of the software. Is quite common that a company launches a free version of a software and than switches to commercial licensing once the number of installation is considerable. This is made in order to reach a wide audience because of the freedom of the product, have a big number of users willing to test beta versions, create expectation before trying to transform users in customers.

I dislike intensely this behaviour, because is not fair!

Obsolescence
Even if the "freedom" promise is real, the developer team may not be really interested in maintaining the development live, so the product runs toward a slow but sure obsolescence.

Free mean "at your own risk"
If you pay nothing to get a things you also get no warranties about that things and no support in case of problems.
In case of problems one can usually rely on web-communities only (if active).

Free software doesn't mean "zero money investment"
The total cost of a software solution is not only the pure cost of the license, very often the most important costs are the analysis and selection of software and the training of HR.

So, mainly in business, I apply some rules with the aim to discover "Free software" solutions that are also good deals.

Prefer open-source
Close-source free products are the best candidates to get involved in the situation previously depicted.
The owner of source codes can switch from a licence to another and decide about the life-cycle of the product.
Even open-source projects can die because of lack of development, but in case of crucial business involved the last chance is to directly support the development.

Prefer solutions based on wide community
The more the product is widely used and the development team is active, the more the software would thrive for long.

Plan the way-out
Even if the project is promising good things try to answer the question:"what if the project will die?". Some ways out can be:

• Start maintaining the code (maybe really expensive in term of resources...)
• Switch to an existing fork or equivalent product
• Build a new similar product from scratch
• Buy a commercial version if exists

The way-out plan is mandatory if the free product or service is part of the core business. It would be unacceptable to build an important business over a weak solution or a solution with an uncertain future!
This means that in general is a bad choice to use free-closed-source software in core businesses.

DokuWiki is another amazing open source project I cannot do without in my everyday activities.

It's a long time since I first uploaded dokuwiki to my server and I started playing with.

I started playing with wikis before I thought how wikis could had helped me in my daily work. Web introduced the hyperlink concept, wiki made it simple and introduced a fast way to create hyperlinked pages.

Today, thanks to a lot of extensions and plugins, wikis migrate far from the original purpose (see the page plugins in dokuwiki for an idea on how wide is the use of a wiki): generic web sites, blogs, documentation repositories, forums, data collections; but the "core business" is, for sure, sites requiring powerful hyperlink management.

In my personal and professional experience I tried to use a wiki as ToDo management (rapidly abandoned in favor of freemind as I widely depicted in my previous post), as customer relations management (rapidly abandoned due to small interest from customers), and as documentation repository. The latter was the most successful experience, mainly in collaborative environments.

Before dokuwiki I tested a lot of wiki packages (see WikiMatrix for a realtime comparison with other wiki tools), but none of them caught my attention because all missed in some aspects or functionalities. When I tested DokuWiki I immediately felt that it was the right tool, it was the only one satisfying any of the functionalities I was interested in. Following a short list of them:

Simple and effective installation procedure

Dokuwiki can be installed on quite any web server, in particular I tried it on apache and IIS without any problems.

It doesn't require any database engine so the test installation can be made in seconds and  existing installations can be cloned with a simple copy of the files.

Light system requirements

Dokuwiki is light, it uses low resources and runs even with old php releases (>4.3.3).

Extensive documentation

The documentation is wide and complete, indeed it is provided by a dokuwiki... it is always up to date and users can collaborate in writing.

Page storage method

One of the things I best appreciate in dokuwiki is the way it stores the pages. Dokuwiki doesn't use any database, no particular and fancy repositories, but only the file system: one page one file. I like this!

This mean simple backup, simple maintenance and, really important to me, data longevity. I like that my data is stored in a open way and I like thinking that anytime I can get my data out from dokuwiki, see it with a simple text editor (with a simple file copy) and use it whatever I want. The multi file model is good even for security because data loss can be limited to single files.

Good user management

Dokuwiki has the merit to provide a really simple and effective ACL management. Indeed ACL has come with time, the very early ACL management wasn't a real ACL, but in the last releases ACL became complete and effective.

Complete and Friendly Syntax

The textual syntax usable in writing texts is really complete and, at a certain point, intuitive. The visual editor helps for the simpler formatting options, but for the expert user there are plenty of tags. Some good plugins introduce functionality not covered by native syntax.

For a complete example see the syntax page on dokuwiki web site.

I often use the syntax highlight functionality in order to highlight source code written in various languages, and the math plugin capable of rendering mathematical expressions written in (La)TeX or in MathML.

Plugins

DokuWiki cames with plenty of free plugins extending the functionalities of the engine, the syntax  and the way of rendering pages.

Templates

DokuWiki comes with a lot of templates also. I listed this as the last topic because I'm not really interested in changing layout or look&feel of my documentation repository. I thinks that look&feel customization for technical repositories is not as important as in blogs or personal web-site. Anyway the list of template is full and building a new template is quite simple.