There are many open source alternatives to the proprietary/licensed versions of common commercial software applications. For those of us who serve the small business customer, these alternatives can provide a means to increase our income and drive sales by providing solutions for our customers that they might not otherwise be able to afford.
A good example of this is a small company with about 15 users that wants the benefits of a groupware server (mail, shared calendering and documents, etc.) but cannot realistically afford Microsoft's SBS or Exchange. Enter Zimbra, an open source collaboration suite. Zimbra offers everything that Exchange does in an easy to install and manage package: mail server (POP & IMAP), shared calendering, shared documents, and a host of other goodies. Users access their mail and other features via a web browser (ala OWA) making remote access available to the users even when they are at home or on the road.
Take a look at the screen shot below, does it look familiar? No, that's not OWA, it's Zimbra! Setup and administration is done via the web interface but there are also several command line tools available to perform various functions such as importing mail from an existing mail server, batch creation of user accounts, etc. User authentication can be done locally or Zimbra can be tied into an existing Active Directory environment for authentication. As a service provider, you can enable inbound port 22 and port 7071 traffic through the customer's firewall (from your IP address at the shop only!) and have secure remote access to configuration files and the administrative interface to help your customers with any problems that they may have.
Zimbra is installed on top of a basic Linux operating system. I built mine on top of Ubuntu server. Download the iso image for Ubuntu Server 6.06.1 LTS and install the operating system. You can accept defaults during the install with the exception of the IP address; if it grabs a DHCP address just use the “back” button and manually assign the proper information. Next, install the Zimbra suite. A good how-to can be found here .
Setup of Zimbra (including a quick start guide) can be found in the documentation at the Zimbra web site .
So, procure a decent server (nothing fancy, P4 2+Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 150-200 GB HD), install Ubuntu/Zimbra, and offer it to your clients as an “open source Exchange” server. Mark up the hardware to include a nice profit and cover your time building the server, charge them a few bucks for installation, offer support at maybe $500.00/yr, and start making some money on open source!
Keep in mind that Zimbra is just the tip of the iceberg. There's Ebox (an SBS like clone), Snort/BASE (IDS), IPCop (Sonicwall like firewall), MySQL/MyPHP Admin (database and frontend), Ntop (network and bandwidth utilization), Apache (web server), Nagios (networking monitoring and alerting), PacketFence (NAC), Zenoss (an HP OpenView/What'sUp Gold like clone), Squid/SquidGuard (a Websense/SurfControl like clone), many different versions of the Linux desktop, etc, etc. Start getting familiar with Linux and open source and you will find that you have something to offer your customers that the “other guys” don't.
As always, if you have any questions, comments, problems, or want to name your first born after me, please feel free to contact me at thughes@fwpm.com.