Quote5. The joys of open source software and stability. Long ago, during the development of our early titles, we decided to use Linux wherever possible as our server back-end OS, and we kept to this same practice when creating Dark Age of Camelot. We have extensive Linux experience in-house, and it made sense for us to stay with a platform that we knew could handle the task and also was, well, free.

Because running Camelot would require a considerable amount of data management, we initially planned on using Oracle to store account and character information. However, Oracle's quoted license fee of more than $900,000 quickly removed them from contention. Once we got over our shock and amusement at Oracle's pricing, we turned to a Linux-based freeware solution, MySQL, to manage Camelot's data storage, which so far has worked admirably.

Everyone developing games should at least investigate open source solutions for their servers. It's saved us a pile of money and has been stable and reliable.