Recently, in the Xing forums (Xing.com), a moderator asked who might be willing to share their success stories involving Free/Open Source Software. Sanjay Arora gave Blue GNU permission to share his company's experience, as posted in the forum. It is interesting because the company has a policy against using non-FOSS. It is published here in its entirety.

We are a SME Company in India with three users working with computers (total employees about 20), shortly it will be six, as we will move on to accounting etc. In addition to three desktops, we have three servers and one dedicated firewall computer. I am a computer hobbyist, used to like to program in my teen days, have run & crashed a dot-com in the years of woe ;-) Now I have a International Trade Consulting Company & in addition work in my father's Rice Mill.

At our office we have a pfsense firewall (www.pfsense.org) which is a freeBSD based firewall that protects our small LAN, provides a DMZ and provides fail-over connectivity through one ppoe broadband & two static ip broadband connections. Earlier, it used to be IPcop which is also a very good firewall but does not provide multiple WAN capability.

We have only one machine which runs Windows and that too is dual-boot and is only used when the technicians from our ISPs need to be convinced that the trouble is not with our machines...you see they understand only Windoze. We do not have any other non-OSS software in our company.

A seperate machine does online network backups using an OSS software called backupPC (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/)

All machines run on Centos Linux 5 (www.centos.org), which is a very stable server & desktop platform, though my own machine is a dual-boot one with an installation of Fedora 6 Linux too, for cutting edge features.

We use openoffice (www.openoffice.org) for office documents, qmail (www.qmailtoaster.com) for our mailservers, postgreSQL (www.postgreSQL.org) Server for our RDBMS Database, Apache 2 (www.apache.org) web-server for our intranet, which provides project management, to do lists, web-based document management etc. In fact, you will be amazed to hear that despite having all this we have not built a web-site.

Our next project in IT is a web-site with an extranet built into it so our client dialog can be automated & tracked. In fact it is going to be a complete customer interface that will interact with our customer database and it will interact with our intranet. In addition, we intend to store emails, faxes in the RDBMS to enhance client communication.

We do not use any commercial software. Its a policy. Till now we have used existing OSS software implementations. We have used free-lance system administrators, though I dabble a bit myself when I get the time. However, when one tastes what automation can do, one needs custom features. Here is what we have decided:

- We will hire free-lance programmers here in India or other low-cost countries and develop required features, in consultation with our software projects.
- We will submit the enhancements & customizations to the concerned OSS software projects for adding to the project.
- If we develop any new project, however small, it will be GPL'd and hosted on sourceforge. I guess, its payback time.