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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.

5 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. TFA could use more in depthness by uncledrax · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  2. Re:I don't get it... by Kt.foss.zealot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Zzzzzz by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Great Linux Innovations Of 2008 by TinuvaZA · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Zzzzzz by ToasterMonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.