Just out of curiostiy, I wrote up these nice, nifty software architectures as they exist in Open Source World and how do they compare with Microsoft’s and “Commercial Unix” offerings.

Just for the fun of it, for each piece of software in the architecture, I also added my biased, subjective opinion on what I consider to be the better of the three. These entries are subtly written with blue. Where I did not have any personal experience with the software, I have left all three black and would welcome any opinions readers might have on these.

So, for example, on the database, I compared alternatives from open source, microsoft and unix as postgres, ms-sql server and oracle respectively. I then colored oracle blue as I consider that to be the best of the three (though, I also believer ms-sql server is fast catching up).

The idea came up because we just started this open-souce hobby group in my company, where we looking at potential areas in open-source space to contribute to. And I thought it would be useful to come up with software architecture models for OSS vs commercial offerings and see where open source need to work the most.

UPDATE: I have updated the stack to now have more categories.