Lately I've been configuring a trial installation of MediaWiki and Movable Type using a shared instance of MySQL on a Windows server. I'm happy to say that I've got everything up and running.

I expected this experiment to be learning curve, but this curve has turned out to be twistier than it needed to be. I'm emerging from the experience a little disappointed with open source software.

Here are some of the more memorable problems I encountered during the installation.

• The most serious problem was the lack of instructions on installing the latest version of MediaWiki with the latest releases of PHP and MySQL on a Windows server. I searched within the MediaWiki support community and all across the Web for answers. Ultimately, I used a hodgepodge of instructions from a variety of sources to get everything to work.
• Since all the MediaWiki instructions I found were out of date, nothing was helpful from start to finish. Little things were inaccurate, but each "little" thing was essential to getting everything to work. For example, It took time to figure out why certain things existed that the instructions said would not, or why other things did not exist which were supposed to be present. It surprised me that there were no up-to-date instructions for a software platform that is in such active development and so widely used.
• There were also gaps in the Movable Type installation instructions. Movable Type is not truly open source any more, since there are user license fees, so I would have expected Six Apart to do better.
• The PHP site recommends downloading the installer package. However, PHP 5.0 doesn't have an installer package, at least none that I could find. Finally, I found a blog posting written by a kind soul that gave clear instructions on installing 5.0 on a Windows server. These instructions claimed that the installer package was not needed, and besides wasn't even functional. At least this individual actually found it to begin with!
• If you want to install the MySQL server on a non-standard port for security reasons, you'll have to figure this out for yourself since the MediaWiki community doesn't address this directly. By default, MediaWiki won't install under a non-standard database server port. The technique for dealing with this turned out to be easy, but only after I figured out what needed to be done. Before I could determine the strategy, I had to install MySQL on the standard port, install MediaWiki, re-do the MySQL instance to set it to a non-standard port, and then revise the wiki's LocalSetting.php to configure the non-standard port. Of course, I also had to know enough to open this port in the server's Windows Firewall.
• When installing a second wiki, I learned that I needed to use the same DBuser account for MySQL or else the first wiki would stop working because its user password became changed. There may be a way around this, but I haven't figured it out yet.
• MediaWiki does not easily scale on a Windows server - and good luck finding useful instructions on how to set up a wiki farm on Windows. Because there is no "link" command on the Windows operating system, re-using a single instance of the basic installation code for all wikis on the farm is not easy. I haven't figured it out yet, though I believe there are solutions. Yes, I realize that open source means Linux and not Windows, but there are always reasons why an institution selects the types of servers it runs.
• MediaWiki itself is quirky and balks at certain basic operations. For example, iIf you want to revise the left-hand navigation bar, good luck dealing with the software's cache. I've tried every solution I've read about, and my changes have yet to appear. MediaWiki needs to facilitate basic design changes more readily.

Naturally, there was work to be done to configure PHP, Perl, cgi and other Unix/Linux-based technologies on the Windows server. This I expected and didn't mind. So I'm not complaining about that!

So what does this say about the open source movement? Probably nothing that most of you don't already know. And needless to say, commercial software comes with its own set of problems. For me, this experience reminds me that open source software has many advantages, but it can come with a price measured in ways other than the cost of the product. My experience with MediaWiki, MovableType, PHP, MySQL and Perl has revealed a movement that is less than the sum of its parts.

I will advocate for using open source, because it offers great software. But I won't be its champion until the types of problems I described begin to get solved.