BitNami Adds Modules

I previously introduced you to BitNami, which is doing an excellent job of packaging popular open-source applications for turnkey installation. They've not been idle in the past few months. In addition to adding ever more applications to install, they've now taken the next step and modularized the process.

Previously, each piece of software you installed with BitNami was entirely self-contained. For example, if you used their packaging to put both WordPress and Drupal on the same server, you'd end up with two copies of Apache, two of MySQL, and so on. While this made for easy configuration and trouble-free installs, it also had the potential to waste a lot of disk space and system resources.

Now, for the PHP applications that they support, you can go a different route. Start with one of their basic application stacks - versions are available for Windows, Linux, OS X, and Solaris. Then you can plug in applications as "modules": self-contained packages that know how to make use of the services from the application stack.

The new approach makes using BitNami to set up a corporate server with a variety of open source software easier than ever. By continuing to lower the bar for system administration - one of the more difficult hurdles for newcomers to open source - BitNami are doing excellent work to help spread open source software.