Editor’s note: Last month, Newspapers & Technology columnist Tom Arnold covered the evolution of open source software and identified some of its many deployments: operating systems, Web servers, databases, content management systems, development tools and desktop application suites. In this month’s column, Arnold will discuss how newspapers are using these types of software.

The Linux operating system is one of the most useful open source software projects available.

Linux can be downloaded at no charge from a number of Web sites, but in practice it makes more sense to pay for a well-packaged and documented version, or distribution. All the distributions come bundled with a large number of open source tools (including Apache) and most have a mechanism for installing updates online via an Internet connection.

Since Linux is effectively a branch of the Unix family tree, administrators with Unix experience have little trouble finding their way around Linux.

For sites already running Unix, Linux is “a natural progression for any external tasks that need to be done that you don’t want run on the main server,” said Jessie Hochberg, system manager for The Middletown (N.Y.) Times Herald-Record.

The Herald-Record uses Linux to anchor a number of operations. It’s used to manage file servers supporting Windows-based workstations. It’s also used to power the daily’s DHCP servers. DHCP, or dynamic host control protocol, provides dynamic IP addressing. Reflecting its versatility, the Linux software runs on a variety of older Intel-based boxes, Hochberg said.

To enable file serving, Linux integrates with Samba, another open source application that uses Microsoft’s server message block protocol. This provides a stable, low-cost server that “looks just like a Windows file share,” according to Hochberg.

Linux is only part of The Herald-Record’s mix of open source applications. The paper has also deployed the OpenOffice suite of desktop applications for several dozen users in areas that don’t need the full functionality of MS Office.

“(For) somebody who needs basic stuff like a spreadsheet that can read and write Excel, we’ll deploy OpenOffice,” Hochberg said.

The Herald-Record runs an important production system on Linux as well. Its SCS/Track ad tracking system from Software Consulting Services LLC operates on Dell servers running Red Hat Linux release 7.1. The servers are “stable and solid as a rock,” Hochberg said.

Content management with open source

A number of content management systems for Web site deployment have also been developed as open source tools. Two that have been developed by newspapers are Cofax (www.cofax.org) and Props (props.sourceforge.net).

A team working for Knight Ridder’s Philadelphia newspapers developed Cofax. It is now part of Knight Ridder Digital’s Software for Dynamic Publishing system, which includes proprietary components as well. Cofax itself remains available as an open source package. Using SDP, Knight Ridder Digital’s Real Cities hosts dozens of Knight Ridder newspaper sites.

“Today, other industries, even financial institutions, rely on open source,” said Rajiv Pant, Knight Ridder Digital’s vice president of engineering, explaining why he tapped open source. “By being an enterprise-class product, Cofax encourages the news media industry to consider open source options. That will help Knight Ridder and other media companies compete with the online-only players who, with their dot-com heritage, may be thought of as more technologically advanced.”

According to Karl Martino, software engineer for Knight Ridder Digital, “When we started tackling Cofax it was a huge project to be taking on with just a few people and with very little money. Open source provided additional resources and help.”

The open source approach also enabled Knight Ridder to benefit from thorough testing and debugging by developers and users outside the newspaper group’s engineering team.

A French company, Smile, developed a port that enables Cofax to run with the open source MySQL database in addition to the Microsoft SQL Server on which it was originally launched.

While Cofax was developed by a large media conglomerate, Props was written by a smaller publisher, The Herald-Mail Co. in Hagerstown, Md.

“We reviewed Cofax and felt it would be too complex for a small- or medium-sized paper to install and the feature set was designed to support publishing spread across multiple sites. We felt a product designed for the small- or medium-sized newspaper might fill a niche in the market,” said Mark Kelly, operations director for The Herald-Mail. Props is built with the open source programming language PHP and MySQL. It currently runs the paper’s Web site, www.heraldmail.com.

By developing Props as open source, Kelly said, “the product would have the opportunity to grow, support and development costs could be spread across a range of organizations and modules with new functionality would be developed. That’s the hope, anyway.”

Several other sites use Props, but Herald-Mail Online is currently the only newspaper site in production with it.

A software project may be built with open source tools but the final product is not necessarily released as an open source project. Consider News Ease 2, a content management system used by the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. The system is based on open source components but runs on the proprietary Solaris operating system with Sybase as the database engine.

Still, it serves pages using the open source Apache Web Server with PHP and Perl components.

The original version of News Ease was built with Perl. Once the application was rewritten with PHP, Star Tribune principal architect Jason Schmitz found that the new version didn’t work well with Netscape Enterprise Server, the application’s original Web server foundation. Instead, Schmitz tapped Apache to do the job.

“We were looking to upgrade the server. We knew that PHP would work very well with Apache. The migration was really very simple. We ran it for a month with no problems, and we’ve since converted all of the Web servers,” he said.

The enhanced design of News Ease 2 permits higher traffic. Schmitz said the paper served 3.2 million Web pages Nov. 6, the day after the mid-term elections. That’s almost three times the capacity of News Ease 1, Schmitz said.

More than content

Newspapers are doing more than content management with open source. When The Wenatchee (Wash.) World remodeled its headquarters, managers faced an unusual challenge.

For years, a large electromechanical light board had been in the newspaper’s lobby, displaying the whereabouts of the daily’s employees. But moving the board posed a big headache. To solve the problem, the paper’s engineers used open source tools to write an application that recreated the light board.

Visitors can use a Web browser at lobby kiosks to determine employee status. The information is made possible by a PHP application wed to a MySQL database, according to The World’s Steve Schroeder.

“We are a small daily newspaper, 26,000 daily, and we try to do a lot of innovative things but if we weren’t using open source we wouldn’t have been able to do the project,” he said.

What about using open source for mission-critical applications?

“Up until a couple of years ago I didn’t think there’d be a huge role for open source. But as we’ve used it in other projects, it’s worked so well, I would certainly consider it,” Schroeder replied.

Tom Arnold is a managing partner of Summit Media Partners LLC, a management consulting firm serving media companies. He has worked with newspapers across America in the areas of process improvement, cross-functional teams, activity-based costing, cost ofŽquality, operational measurements and computer systems. Send comments and queries to tarnold@smpllc.com or visit www.summitmediapartners.com.