AMPs

What is the AMP solution? It is a collection of some of the most commonly used open source applications - Apache, MySQL, and PHP. There are a ton of resources from which to learn more about AMP, but here is a good article from the 2001 era on the Linux AMP or LAMP as it is known.  http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2001/01/25/lamp.html 

I like this line best: 

"Of course, there are plenty of excellent open source variants for any of the pieces of LAMP. Let the L stand for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin/Mac OS X, all of which are open source operating systems and all but the latter have open source GUI layers. Let the M stand for MySQL and PostGreSQL. Let the P stand for PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby."

So what?  

Well if you are thinking of buying web based software for a small to mid-sized company spend a little bit of time researching the current offerings on the AMP stack and other Open Source platforms.  As an example I have been singularly impressed with the initial research on Alfresco. I can't wait to try out the integration with MS-Office, the collaboration options and workflow options.  Although technically not an AMP project (it is Java/mySQL), it still represents the open source movement well.    Read more here: http://www.alfresco.com/products/dm/