Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
this point, the fl exibility provided by the open culture of the FLOSS
solutions is generally seen as a positive. However, once deployment to a
production environment is being considered, the associated business-
critical workfl ows result in some of these same advantages becoming
signifi cant risks.
For example, a FLOSS solution might be considered robust but without
an active developer community attached to it, the solution might become
non-viable over time. This is particularly true if it is not being updated
relative to the technology stack on which it is hosted. Alternatively, a
large and active support community can fragment the codebase, resulting
in multiple, possibly confl icting branches and variants. In some cases,
these risks maybe mitigated by employing third-party vendor support
models, a model which is becoming increasingly common. Of course, an
organisation can also decide to fork the codebase itself and develop some
features specifi c to its business requirements. Consequently, the burden
of full support, along with all the inherent costs falls to that organisation
alone. In light of these risks and costs, continuing with a FLOSS solution
into production is not a trivial decision.
13.2.6 Production Deployment phase use-case:
Pfi zerpedia - Enterprise Wiki
MediaWiki is the FLOSS that was originally developed for Wikipedia,
the free encyclopaedia web site used by many millions of users every day.
As well as powering the family of Wikipedia web sites it is also used by
hundreds if not thousands of web sites elsewhere on the web and within
a number of large company intranets. The MediaWiki software [19] is
available to download for free from
http://mediawiki.org
and contains a
number of class-leading wiki features. Because of the high visibility of the
Wikipedia [20] site, the MediaWiki software is very familiar to most
users and the software has been explored by a number of life science
organisations (see Chapter 16 for another example).
Although MediaWiki is FLOSS, it is clearly high quality and has many
traits suitable for deployment in the enterprise. For instance, scalability
of MediaWiki has been proven quite clearly by the implementation of
Wikipedia on the web. For an enterprise organisation, this scalability is
not an advantage solely in terms of performance. It also brings the
functions necessary for large numbers of users to happily coexist on
the same platform, and system administration tools required to manage
the large number of pages that will (rapidly) be created within the wiki.
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