Slashdot Mirror
SourceForge's Hottest Five Apps
davidmwilliams points us to his story up on IT Wire about the top five most active open source projects on SourceForge. (Sourceforge.net and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge Inc.) He writes, "It explains what they do and why they're useful. Most of these will be new to most people but all are definitely bursting with potential."
Stellarium is right up there with Celestia for outstanding astro simulations. I use the two together when planning a night of stargazing or meteor watching in the mountains, and highly recommend them to anyone. Both have somewhat odd UIs to get used to, but it's one of the rare cases where the app itself is so uniquely useful that the UI is a secondary concern.
SourceForge is too big now. If you start a project and have a support request--good luck getting it answered. Having fought with their CVS implementation for a few weeks, I abandoned sourceforge for GoogleCode. Much easier.
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Despite your snaky cynicism (which is probably what got your the flamebait mod) I tend to agree with you sentiment. I ditched Azures months ago for uTorrent due mostly to it's unnecessary bloat. Are there even any worth while plug-ins for it?
For the type of app that generally runs consistently in the background bloat is the last thing you want, similarly a pretty interface isn't all that necessary based on the amount of time most users will actually spend looking at it.
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Check http://www.legaltorrents.com/ - legal files distributed via Bittorrent.
But since you mentioned software, check http://www.planeshift.it/ - an open source game distributed via Bittorrent.
I thought the benefit was that Azureus was blatantly open source, where you could (potentially) see the code and ensure that it wasn't doing anything shady. I've heard uTorrent slandered because it is not open and that the (new?) owner of uTorrent has some dubious associations with anti-P2P associations.
Funny you should mention the Open source aspect. I'm all for open source (I even make donations to several projects) but on more than one occasion I received tips from various sources to "not upgrade to the latest Azureus because of..." it seems that regularly people would slip trojans, viruses, spyware and other nasties into the official releases. It was enough make me turn off the auto-update feature and wait for the "all clear". Though I never really looked into any of those claims, it certainly made by decision to switch clients easier when I was looking for something less bloated.
As for dubious intentions of uTorrent's developers, you're mention is the first I've heard of it.
Collector's Edition