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The 10 Coolest Open Source Products of 2008
An anonymous reader writes "Open Source Software is about more than just the Linux operating system, and 2008 brought advances in the form of OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, Firefox and Android. But Linux is still the heart of the FOSS movement, and this year brought key developments in the operating system as well. Here's a look at the coolest open source products to come across the transom in 2008." Along roughly similar lines, davidmwilliams points out the year in review of the iTWire's "Linux Distillery" column.
2 Ubuntus, 2 SuSes, a new Fedora.. and a host of applications that just version incremented this year, and a twitter clone.
Meh.
Not dissing the applications.. I think OO3 is a vast improvement, and newer versions of an OS is probably a good thing.. I was just hoping for stuff that wasn't just 'Newest release of MyFlavourHere linux based OS'
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
I didn't even read the the rest, dos not seem worth it. Why can't these list articles have sofware like this.
WinDirStat is my #1 favorite OSS by far and above anything else. This year I have used it a ton, and I even have a contribution budgeted for Feb. It's small, fast, useful and beautiful. Thank you WINDIRSTAT!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Even if they were new, five are Linux distributions. And that's not counting Android.
Yeah, Linux is cool, distributions are cool, but you'd think they would show some variety. Coolest one I've seen all year -- that is new -- is Archaeopteryx. Perhaps not a big deal, but weren't they doing the 10 coolest projects, not the 10 most important projects?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
How about some individual projects? Amarok 2 came out in 2008. Other things that existed before but which improved mightily in '08 were:
Flock (released v2)
KDE Released 4x series, abysmal at first, but it's great now.
BasKet Probably doesn't belong on a Best Apps Ever list, but it is pretty useful. This existed before, but I just found it this year and it's great, and it has become a lot more stable for me through the year. Someone help get them to qt4!
There are lots of great apps out there that deserve some love this year.
I like music
I don't think it's just me,.. but I was pretty much crippled when forced to use Microsoft Office Suite 2007 at work for the first week or so. The whole ribbon bullshit interface just seems completely counter-intuitive to me. Not to mention the unexpected way Microsoft Word 2007 handles simple things, It seems like I spend 20 minutes writing a document, and hours trying to make an unwanted line-gap go away, or trying to figure out some stupid header or footer issue. Somehow even LaTeX seems easier to use. Anyway, OpenOffice seems pretty intuitive to me for most uses, such as simple text editing, which is what most people sans-OCD do pretty easily anyway on pretty much any text editor. While the total cost of migrating to OpenOffice in most offices is most definately not 0, it's probably not higher than Microsoft Licenseing fees, and even if they were I think in the long run it could still save the company money, as most users have to re-learn MS Office every few years anyway.
Thanks for that. I see that half of their coolest ten are all Linux. Not run on Linux, but ARE Linux!
I wish slashdot would quit posting interesting summaries of mediocre websites and stories.
Free Martian Whores!
How did Stellarium and/or Celestia *not* make this list!? If one's criteria is for "Cool" applications, these can't do anything but qualify.
I clicked on this article thinking I could maybe find some really cool open source piece of software that I haven't seen yet. I am completely unimpressed, the list is barely anything more than a bunch of Linux distros.
Here's my personal favorite open source project I discovered in 2008: Spring Engine http://spring.clan-sy.com/
my 2 cents
I actually think the article "Great Linux Innovations Of 2008" on http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=great_linux_innovations_2008&num=1 was much better.
The interface of a mature product shouldn't be subject
to extreme gratuitous changes. This is one key area where
something like vi or emacs soundly beats the likes of
msoffice. People should stop putting up with this crap.
"Stop the madness" and demand a good reason why the UI
of msoffice isn't the same as it was 10 years ago.
Nevermind the differences between this years and last
year's version of msoffice.
Change for it's own sake is just assinine. Putting up
with it out of some sort of "geek machismo" is similarly
assinine.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Is it worth it for what you do with it?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Thanks for that. I see that half of their coolest ten are all Linux. Not run on Linux, but ARE Linux!
...and two of them are just different versions of Ubuntu. WTF?
How about OpenSolaris for Christ's sake? The first Sun supported Solaris LIVE CD for desktops, had it's initial 2008.05 release and a new 2008.11 release this year. That's just not as cool as Ubuntu, and... newer Ubuntu I guess. What in 2008 did these Linux distros do that rates being in a top 10 OSS list anyway? OpenSolaris had it's _FIRST_ release at least, I would expect that at a minimum. Two f'ing Ubuntu's...
I wish slashdot would quit posting interesting summaries of mediocre websites and stories.
It NEVER ends.
With like 4 different Linux distros, you're complaining about that? Seriously, is the opensource community so bereft of interesting software programs that they had to fill up that many spots with Linux? I get that distros vary widely between each other, but come on.