DIY-IT: How Linux and Open Source Are Bringing Do-It-Yourself to Information Technology

A disgruntled ex-employee saw a nail-your-butt opportunity, so he called the BSA. I was sued under federal seal. There was no warning. We were raided at 10 am on a Friday. We were shut down and ordered not to touch our computers. There were armed marshals. Our employees were sitting there going “What's the matter? Is our company criminal? Are we crooks?” Then they sent out press releases....It's coincidental that they always send these out after a business is closed.

We're the number one employer in terms of manufacturing in San Luis Obispo. We're a big fish in a little pond. The headline reads, “Ernie Ball Raided for Piracy”, and the story says, “Company officials unavailable for comment”. Well, no [surprise]. I was at home. And I never say “No comment”. So, when it came time to tell my story, I said, “They came for bear and got squirrel.”

The worst thing was when Microsoft printed a four-color reproduction of that newspaper article on an executive's desk, sent it to every registered Microsoft user and said “Don't get caught like Ernie Ball—a fine company that found out just how hard it is to stay compliant. Call us. We'll give you a free audit and sell you software at 20% off.” Keep in mind that we already had downloaded the BSA self-auditing software and it didn't work. This was fear-based marketing, with government help.

Everybody thought I was crazy. The IT people thought they were going to get fired. I said “no”, because I've never seen any greater programming in the world than “You can't do business unless you've got an office suite on your desk.” Hey, I'm talking here at LinuxWorld because I changed my word processor. The solution everybody [at our company] uses is a cocktail of open-source stuff. Nobody showed us how to do it. We had to figure it out ourselves.

We support 8,000 clients in ten countries. In 2002 we sold 95 million tickets through channels that represented over four billion US dollars. This puts us in the top 25 of all retail Web properties—actually number two, between Dell and Amazon. So we're doing a lot of business, but on behalf of other people who have entrusted us with their business.

We have 3,500 outlets, 19 call centers and the Ticketmaster.com Web site, which does about 50% of our business. We also provide box-office solutions. If you've ever purchased a ticket at a box office, that's also a Ticketmaster system, with the same inventory bucket.

Our product and technology organization is the cornerstone of Ticketmaster as a company. We've got 250 people devoted to product and technology in an organization that has about 2,000 full-time employees.

We provide solutions and systems, but we also support those 8,000 clients. In many cases, because of the nature of the business—highly customized, highly variable traffic and all kinds of strange configurations that actually are much different from any other retail businesses—there are no commercial solutions available for what we need to do.

In fact, we are one of the first application service providers: extending the service to thousands of clients, actually writing the code, hosting the system, providing the customer service and charging a fee per unit sold. We have to build high-volume systems for very specific and peculiar businesses. Open source allows us to do [this] as well or better—at least in our experience—at half the price of commercial solutions.

That's why Ticketmaster converted the Ticketmaster.com site primarily to open-source technologies over the course of the last 18 months.

It's really all about licensing costs. We buy the the same class of machine, same configuration, from the same vendor. But we're using all open-source technologies in these areas, and we pay nothing for licensing. So you can see that we save 50 cents on every dollar we invest and get the same or better performance. And we see better support from the community than we typically get from commercial vendors.

The Web site costs, in hardware and capital development, a couple million bucks. So it's a small fractional part. It doesn't materially change the business from Wall Street's perspective or from the CFO's perspective. But it matters to us because we can use the money that's made available to employ more smart people. And that's really the key.