Once upon a time, using open-source servers and applications for business was frowned upon in many circles. Today, you’d be hard pressed to find any sizeable infrastructure that doesn’t leverage open-source code in some form or another, be it a few MySQL databases, Apache on the Web servers, or a pile of Perl, PHP, Ruby, or Python applications holding things together.

It occurred to me today that open-source infrastructure providers (e.g., commercial providers of open-source operating systems, databases, application servers, etc.) may have much in common with telecommunications infrastructure providers (like cable, wireless, etc. providers).

This year's convention will include 40 tutorials that go deep into the technology behind open source innovations and over 400 sessions focusing on Administration, Business, Databases, Emerging Topics, Java, Linux, People, Perl, PHP, Programming, Python, Ruby, Security, Web Applications, and much more

It may be time to turn out the lights on the LAMP stack. Four years ago, LAMP (Linux OS, Apache Web server, MySQL database and Perl, Python and PHP languages) was the open stack of choice, especially for Web servers.

So just what is it about Linux and Open Source that company owners and executives don’t like?

If you’re like a lot of IT organizations, you’ve got servers from Hewlett-Packard, routers from Cisco, operating systems from Red Hat and Microsoft – and you may even have Solaris from Sun somewhere.

There were new metrics out this week for both EnterpriseDB's PostgreSQL-centric database business, and Sun Microsystems' MySQL business. These players are at the forefront of challenging pricing for databases and surrounding services from competitors such as Oracle, and both are having strong success with strategies focused on open source databases.

Linux-based business-critical servers have found a stable home in the data center and in infrastructure computing applications in organizations of all types. The low-hanging fruit has been harvested; most Linux servers have been installed to handle workloads that traditionally would have run Unix-based operating systems.

Engine Yard, a software developer of cloud deployment and open source tools for Ruby on Rails applications, last week released an open source framework for building fast, high-performance Ruby applications. Called "Merb," the programming tool is similar to Ruby on Rails.