Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold

One of the many fascinating aspects of the Wikileaks #cablegate saga is that, unusually, computer technology plays a central rather than peripheral role in all this. And not just any old computer technology, but specifically aspects that are key to the open source world.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Now You Too Can Contribute to Firefox...

...with your money:

This pilot allows developers to request an optional dollar amount for their Firefox Add-on. Along with requesting this amount, we’re helping developers tell their stories with our new “About the Developer” pages, which explain to prospective contributors the motivations for creating an add-on and its future road map. Since contributions are completely optional, users will have ample time to evaluate an add-on to determine whether or not they want to help a developer.

Some details:

How will payments work?

We are working with PayPal on this pilot to provide a secure and international solution for facilitating payments. Developers can optionally create a PayPal ID for each of their Firefox Add-ons. Users will be presented with a “Contribute” button that gives them the option of paying the suggested amount or a different amount.

This is a nice touch, too:

Why did you call this “Contributions” and not “Donations”?

At Mozilla, we use the word “Contributor” for community members who contribute time and energy to our mission of promoting choice and innovation on the Internet. Our goal is that users who contribute money to developers are supporting the future of a particular add-on, as opposed to donating for something already received.

Quite: this isn't just about getting some well-deserved dosh to the coders, but also about giving users a way to feel more engaged. Great move.

Textbook Enterprise Open Source

There's no more powerful argument in favour of using GNU/Linux in an enterprise context than big names that are already doing so. Google and Amazon are the obvious ones, but we can now add PayPal to the list:

PayPal is currently processing $1,571 worth of transactions per second in 17 different currencies on about 4,000 servers running Red Hat Linux.

The article also gives some very concrete advantages of running a GNU/Linux-based grid in this way:

As PayPal grows it's much easier to grow the grid with Intel (NSDQ: INTC)-based servers than it would be to upgrade a mainframe, he said. In a mainframe environment, the cost to increase capacity a planned 15% or 20% "is enormous. It could be in the tens of millions to do a step increase. In [PayPal's] world, we add hundreds of servers in the course of a couple of nights and the cost is in the thousands, not millions," he said.

PayPal takes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and strips out all features unnecessary to its business, then adds proprietary extensions around security. Another virtue of the grid is that PayPal's 800 engineers can all get a copy of that customized system on their development desktops, run tests on their raw software as they work, and develop to PayPal's needs faster because they're working in the target environment. That's harder to do when the core of the data center consists of large Unix symmetrical multiprocessing boxes or mainframes. In neither case is it cheap to install duplicates for developers, he said.

PayPal Joins the List

One of the most effective ways of convincing sceptics that open source means business is to reel off some of the household names that depend on it: the Web, Google, Amazon, etc. Well, it seems that we can add another biggie: eBay.

PayPal runs thousands of Linux-based, single-rack-unit servers, which host the company's Web-presentation layer, middleware and user interface. Thompson says he quickly saw the economic, operational and development advantages of open source and Linux technology. He now sees no other way to do it.

(Via Matt Asay.)