IBM i has been incorporating and enabling the use of open-source software for a long time now. Our work with the Zend Corporation on making PHP available and easy on our platform is the most well-advertised of these, but you're probably also aware that the web server on every IBM i is the open-source Apache web server.
There is a large community of people putting many other open-source applications on IBM i, though. I talk with many of them – probably the first “open-source on IBM i” person I met at COMMON was Pete Helgren – but there are many more.
In any case, one of the places where people end up playing with open source is the Young i Professionals website, and recently the instructions for implementing the PostgreSQL database were posted there.
Now, before anyone takes this as some big strategic shift, let me assure you it's not. We all know that the best database to use on IBM i is DB2 for i. It’s integrated into the architecture, is adding new function frequently (see the developerWorks page for DB2 for i updates), and has experts helping you understand how to use it (see Mark Anderson’s article on the details of using SSDs and DB2 together.)
However, there's a place for open-source databases in some solutions, especially if you're getting an open-source application from the Internet and it's built on one of these open-source databases.
Open-source solutions are a big part of the industry today, and part of the IBM i strategy is ensuring that our platform can run them – especially for the most commonly used open-source applications in business. This is one reason we created a solution edition for SugarCRM. (An interesting side note – well over a year before IBM introduced the SugarCRM solution edition, Brian May had SugarCRM up and running on the YiPs website sandbox, so people could play around with it.) It's also why we take input from Zend and others on what the next open-source requirements will be.
Twitter: #ibmi @Steve_Will_IBMi #COMMONUG #postgresql #db2
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