The European nuclear research facility, CERN, displayed their commitment to open source software during the recent OSCON. CERN generates immense amounts of information and distributes that information to scientific teams all over the planet, currently CERN maintains over 100 petabytes of data and generates an additional 35 petabytes of data every year. The team at CERN realized that open source methods would be needed to keep this data manageable, so the organization adopted a complete open source mentality. They produced their own scientific distribution of Linux, built from Red Hat, and use OpenStack, Puppet, and Ceph along with many other open source technologies. Employees of CERN actively contribute back to many of the open source projects the organization benefits from. CERN’s use of open source will likely serve as a model for both scientific research and business in the future.
