IT Manager's Journal

When Khera first started out building Web sites in the mid-'90s, "the choice of free software was not all that great," he says. But by late 1999, "when we started MailerMailer, we decided the best way to go was to use stuff for free" -- except for the operating system. Khera purchased Unix because he wasn't comfortable with the state of Linux at the time. Since then, Khera says, he has gradually migrated to FreeBSD because it's cheaper than commercial Unix-based operating systems like AIX and Solaris. The rest of the MailerMailer application is built on Apache and Postfix, uses a PostgreSQL database, and is written in Perl.

MailerMailer lets customers create a newsletter signup page and the text of the email using a browser interface, mail merge tags, and "click-tracking" to see who visited the links included in the newsletter. The MailerMailer service is free for those who send no more than 200 messages per month, or $29.95 for up to 20,000 messages, calculated on a per-recipient basis.

Khera says the biggest challenge of working with open source software is version updates that break the application. "You have to make sure your tools are stable. Some of the development software, from version to version they make gratuitous changes that break the old way of doing things. Over time, we've learned to watch out for that and prepare ourselves. We do a lot of testing before we switch versions. We have test systems that are built just to be broken in that way. If an upgrade works in a different way, we need to figure out how to revise things, or we don't use it. We don't leap in before we test the waters."

Even with the challenges of working with open source, Khera says the benefits are worth it. "Licensing. I don't have to sit there and keep track of what machine is running what and how many CPUs am I allowed to use. If I need to add some capacity, I just buy a nice cheap Dell box and I'm up and running in three days. It's just a very big convenience."

Khera doesn't have a philosophical problem with running commercial software. "There are a couple of applications we do buy licenses for -- for example, our Web analytics software. That's the kind of thing where there's no free software that is of the caliber of what you get in a commercial environment. The things that we use that are open are the best you can get anyway. My philosophy is total cost. If it's going to be cheapest to pay to buy some package because it makes my job easier, I have no problem with that."

Khera recommends due diligence before launching a product built with open source. "The first thing is to identify specific needs and find out if there's software suitable for that, versus trying to fit your operation and the way you do things around what's available. That comes back to my philosophy of finding the best tool for what you need versus adjusting the way you work."