The rise of open source software within both public and private organizations is something well understood, and well documented - industry analysts estimate 80%+ of organizations use open source software within their IT projects.

Typical uses include web infrastructure, internal network infrastructure, IT Development & Test environments and departmental applications.

But open source solutions are not restricted purely to these (very important) "horizontal" apps.  With the wealth of open source projects out there now, it is possible to build highly specialized solutions, addressing very specific problems, that previously could only be addressed with expensive and time consuming internal custom development.

A great example is from a new case study of …

During 2008 we are planning to run a series of interviews with interesting persons somehow related to the telecom field. In this first installment, we will have a chat with Juha Heinänen from Finland.

MySQL: Juha, you are a former professor of Computer Science and Communication technology, CTO (or similar positions) in at least Sonera, Telia and Song, former ATM specialist, responsible for bringing Internet to Finland and registering the .fi top-level domain, a consultant for many early network equipment startups some of which succeeded to be still with us today, and author of several RFC's. Nowadays you are a core contributor to the OpenSER SIP proxy, and you sell a VoIP platform called OpenSIPg based on that to Nordic operators. In addition you seem to live a life that would likely be a dream of many hackers, spending time in different parts of the world hacking on your favorite Open Source project. Even to this date, I …

During 2008 we are planning to run a series of interviews with interesting persons somehow related to the telecom field. In this first installment, we will have a chat with Juha Heinänen from Finland.

MySQL: Juha, you are a former professor of Computer Science and Communication technology, CTO (or similar positions) in at least Sonera, Telia and Song, former ATM specialist, responsible for bringing Internet to Finland and registering the .fi top-level domain, a consultant for many early network equipment startups some of which succeeded to be still with us today, and author of several RFC's. Nowadays you are a core contributor to the OpenSER SIP proxy, and you sell a VoIP platform called OpenSIPg based on that to Nordic operators. In addition you seem to live a life that would likely be a dream of many hackers, spending time in different parts of the world hacking on your favorite Open Source project. Even to this date, I …

During 2008 we are planning to run a series of interviews with interesting persons somehow related to the telecom field. In this first installment, we will have a chat with Juha Heinänen from Finland.

MySQL: Juha, you are a former professor of Computer Science and Communication technology, CTO (or similar positions) in at least Sonera, Telia and Song, former ATM specialist, responsible for bringing Internet to Finland and registering the .fi top-level domain, a consultant for many early network equipment startups some of which succeeded to be still with us today, and author of several RFC's. Nowadays you are a core contributor to the OpenSER SIP proxy, and you sell a VoIP platform called OpenSIPg based on that to Nordic operators. In addition you seem to live a life that would likely be a dream of many hackers, spending time in different parts of the world hacking on your favorite Open Source project. Even to this date, I …