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Open Source: The Next Generation: Page 2 of 6

Technology investors are taking notice, too. MySQL AB, which was organized from the beginning as both a community-software project and a technology company, last year attracted $19 million in venture-capital financing. It's up to 130 employees and growing. JBoss Inc., a 30-employee company, attracted $10 million in venture funding last month, which it plans to use to hire more developers and support specialists and to increase marketing, CEO Marc Fleury says.

Following in the footsteps of Linux and Apache, second-generation open-source products have momentum in their favor and aren't relegated to just backroom development projects. The Java-based JBoss application server handles 10,000 messages a day on La Quinta's Web site, where customer bookings increased 83% last year compared with 2002. "There's tremendous excitement and support for our online initiative," says Raven Zachary, director of Internet technologies.

In the middle of last year, La Quinta took the operation of its Web site back from an outside service and revamped it to better serve online travel shopping. The company was using JBoss for software development and some lesser Web-site applications and determined JBoss version 3, released in June, was ready for its workloads. JBoss also had been certified as Java 2 Enterprise Edition-compatible by Sun Microsystems, a high hurdle with thousands of tests. La Quinta wanted to cluster its reservation servers to allow failover, which would have meant buying four BEA licenses, compared with one for JBoss. "We had no problems with BEA's WebLogic," Zachary says. "This isn't about reliability."

At Sabre Holdings Corp., developer of the Sabre reservation system and the Travelocity Web site, the travel-shopping system is moving off fault-tolerant Compaq Himalaya servers onto a combination of Linux and the MySQL database running on clustered Intel servers. The main reason: Total cost of ownership will be at least 40% cheaper, with anticipated savings of "tens of millions of dollars," chief technology officer Craig Murphy says. But Sabre doesn't trust open source 100% yet--the shopping system's financial transactions will run on commercial software using Hewlett-Packard NonStop systems.

The vendors behind the new open-source products have figured out that service and support are what sells. MySQL is available free under a General Public License or as a commercially licensed system starting at $495 per server; companies buy commercial licenses so they aren't obligated to donate changes back to MySQL development, as required by the GPL. MySQL technical support ranges from $2,500 per year per server for E-mail help to $48,000 per year per server for full-blown, 24-hour emergency service. JBoss is free under what's known as the Lesser General Public License. That lets a company modify it without donating the changes back to the JBoss community. Technical support starts at $10,000 per application per year.