Case Study: University of Delhi Embraces Open Source Tech

What were the Open Source technologies that University of Delhi deployed during 2004-09?

The IT team at DU consisted of a team of three people -one programmer, one assistant and myself. It was decided to go in for Open Source software and we started off with it for all our servers, except the Anti virus server.

Some of the Open Source technologies that we used included Linux running on all servers, LDAP, Apache and Open Source proxy called Squid. We used several versions of Linux -Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, etc. This was done not through a vendor but installed and maintained by this three member team. We used the web server, proxy solution, LDAP and mailing solution primarily in vanilla form but sometimes customized it for additional functionality.

How easy or difficult is it to implement Open Source technologies?

Open Source is good if you have some people who are passionate about the technology and are willing to spend loads of time trying to get it to work when things go wrong. Unless there are people in the team who are interested about it, and not just doing their job, it might be difficult to sustain the management of applications on Open Source when things go wrong.