December 14, 2011

Did you know that Taxi Magic, the first nationwide free online taxi booking service that is directly integrated with taxi dispatch systems, is entirely based on FreeBSD? Philip M. Gollucci, Director of Operations, recently explained why in his testimonial for the Foundation:

RideCharge, Inc. creates innovative technology solutions that improve local ground transportation industries. The company’s most renowned product, Taxi Magic, is an online & mobile software application that revolutionizes the taxi industry by aligning riders, drivers and fleets for a better overall ride experience. Taxi Magic is the first nationwide free online taxi booking service that is directly integrated with taxi dispatch systems, providing consumers with the tools to:

  • Book a taxi from a mobile app or the Web with a few quick taps
  • Track the taxi’s arrival
  • Charge the ride to a credit card through the mobile app
  • Expense the trip with an e-receipt

From its inception, RideCharge has been entirely based on FreeBSD. By leveraging FreeBSD Jails for virtualization, we are able to maximize resources and expand dynamically. ZFS keeps our data safe and our deployments magically quick. Userland DTRACE in FreeBSD 9 is now an indispensable tool for troubleshooting issues in real-time. Even our Juniper firewalls and switches leverage FreeBSD through JUNOS (TM). iXsystems is incredibly helpful in recommending the correct setup and optimizing our technology resources to fit our needs for FreeBSD.

RideCharge is a long time contributor to the FreeBSD ports collection and we employ highly active contributors in the ruby, apache, and perl areas. The Taxi Magic team leverages these incredibly tight feedback loops to quickly and efficiently contribute back to the community.

RideCharge/TaxiMagic has directly sponsored FreeBSD developers to enhance freebsd-update(8). We now use this update to quickly update every machine to maintain PCI DSS Level 1 compliance. These great capabilities are now available to the entire FreeBSD community.