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How To Tell Open-Source Winners From Losers
An anonymous reader writes "There are 139,834 open-source projects under way on SourceForge. IWeek wonders which projects will make lasting contributions, and which will fizzle. Sure, Linux, Apache, and MySQL are winners, but what about OpenVista, FLOSSmole, and Hyperic HQ? What's your list of open-source winners and losers?"
VistA is a medical tracking system. OpenVistA is an OSS implementation.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
And it's actually OpenVistA. Note the trailing upper case.
1. It's from the US.gov
2. It's been around since 2003.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
One of the PostgreSQL developers quoted in the article feels this article is inaccurate in some ways.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
That is just the thing. A 25% market share of your target audience is good. The thing is most OSS apps don't have even a 10% market share.
Another thing that I see is FLOSS apps that are in perpetual beta, that never make it to 1.0. If something has been around for 3 or 5 years, one would think it would be v1.0. Instead, what we see is v0.93.4223587234856852837501613. At some point, it has to be finished.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
There is a free Acrobat Reader alternative called "Foxit", but alas, it is not open source. I gave it a try a few months ago and it was snappier than Acrobat Reader but it didn't play nice with Firefox. It looks like it's been updated since then, so YMMV.
That is by design. Open source means you give away your sourcecode, now matter how insignificant. There is always a (very) small chance somebody takes over where you left. So the work you did should not be deleted. It is part of the SF experience...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
- mOnOwall - firewalling
- IPCop - firewalling
- Metadot - CMS
- Apache - web server
- Bind - Name Server
- asterisk - telephony/voip
- Sendmail - cussed but stable MTA
- SpamAssassin - spam filtering
- MIME-Defang - email content filtering/manipulation
- ClamAV - Virus filtering
- Freebsd - the best OS since sliced bread (IMHO)
- Centos - Not to shabby an OS either
- ...
The other winners are those that are used everyday as part of the tools to do the job and never really thought about. Nmap, vim, perl, portupgrade, cvsup and many more.http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?doci d=14041&group_id=1#project
SQL-ledger is a good bookkeeping package (and a whole lot more) and SugarCRM can handle the CRM side of things. There's even some glue scripts out there to keep the client info sync'd between them.
I'd also add Zimbra to the list of very good non-SourceForge projects. However, to be fair, the original poster was referring mostly to word of mouth being the primary source of info, nothing in the post said, "anything not on SourceForge is te suxors!"
In regards to CRM - I've been using sugarCRM for about 6 months and its been rock solid, with pretty much everything I need to run a quickly growing business. Nice and robust, good forums of users willing to help, and a number of hosters offer it as a one-click include. I found it via the magic google query of ["open source" crm] - just like I found the reporting tool (jasperReports) via ["open source" reporting].
I only ever search through sourceforge, freshmeat etc when I have a name of software that I am specifically searching for - otherwise I find you end up wading through 100's of apps that are abandoned, alpha, etc. I do believe those sites serve a useful purpose, just not as the first point to search.
I'm a big fan of http://plone.org/ which is a CMS that sits on top of the http://www.zope.org/ application server. All of which is OSS. I can't speak to OSS CRM but others here have. There are plenty of fantastic server side developer productivity boosting OSS software out there.
When it comes to client side software there is a huge amount of great OSS apps.
I have used all of these projects for years and would most definitely label them as quality, winner OSS.
That's just it: The Blender GUI IS easy to use. It's just not so easy to learn for the first time. I've never encountered another interface in my 25+ years of computer use that was more focused than Blender's interface on both getting out of your way, and exposing as much functionality as possible to within easy reach. The interface was designed from the ground-up for speed of execution, (and customization for a given task, which is where the OpenGL stuff comes in) making it the most efficient modeling interface of any 3D app out there -- which is what another poster in this thread was talking about when he said he'd won a number of modeling contests thanks to Blender. Learning its interface is a one-time investment with a big payoff in speed.
3D modeling is vastly more difficult to learn for the first time than the Blender interface, so I don't see why people will gladly invest effort in the one but complain about the other. It took me about an hour and a half to get basic familiarity with Blender's interface, and a few days to get comfortable with it.. OTOH, months later I'm still a beginner at 3D modeling. (Maybe 3d software should have a "be a great artist" button, eh? Heh!)