That is an interesting article ,thank you.

again it is obvious that Shutterstock is a true internet/community based business. They understand how to work with online communities, wether they are IT or artists.

I am sure they have a huge cost advantage to other companies that rely on other people�s commercial solutions.

Why Symbiostock will make a dent in the Stock Photo marketplace eventually. Open Source - user driven.

If SS is saving 90% of their costs by going open source, maybe that's just more of an indication why the company is a success. Frugal and Community based.

Interesting article = thanks.

They forgot to mention that thou they use open source code they fail to take advantage of utilizing that large base of free coders by upgrading their own site when that open source community offers security and capability updates free of charge. SS just updated their server software last week to 2.2.15 from Apache 1.3.34 which reached end of life status in 2010.  2.2.15 is still a few releases back, they could have gone to 2.2.25 if they did not want to deal with new release bugs for 2.4.6

Apache 1.3 is so old they do not even mention it on the Apache site any longer. http://httpd.apache.org/

They should update based on security risks alone. The fact that they do not keep up to date, tells me that they are too cheap to update the rest of their code.  That is what the 70% plus we are donating to the cause gets us.

MySQL enables databases to scale horizontally on low cost, commodity hardware to serve read and write-intensive workloads, but if you fail to keep your system current and up to date you will see the type of bugs submitters have been dealing with for the last 5 years.

I would say that is nothing to brag about, but the article makes good PR marketing hype for those who do not understand it.

The one thing about Symbiostock is that is gives its base more control. It will be powered by the very people who have the most to win or lose.