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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.
Android *is* new - but is hardly newsworthy by now.
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
They're saying that MS Office costs $150-200, and OOo, being free is therefore $150-200 less than that.
I think.
.there is enough of everything for everyone.
I think that says that 200 - 0 = 200 (so the OO.org costs less than Microsoft Office... with about $200)
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.
5 of the 10 are just Linux distro's. Ubuntu 8.10 AND 8.04 were both on the list as seperate entries!?!? And Lotus Symphony, a version of OOo, was listed along with OOo as seperate products. For the most part this could have been condensed down to:
Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, Android
Which is so boring a list that it's of no use to anyone actually using open source already.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
This list is entirely without any redeeming value. More than half of the "coolest" products are new versions of operating systems and applications (OMG they released Fedora 9! I may wet myself with glee!), and the rest of it includes useless things like what appears to be a Twitter clone and something IBM's branded as Lotus. Hell, they put Android on there, and that's a hardware platform that doesn't even have a killer app yet.
Ubuntu's on it twice for goodness' sakes! And the second time is the long-term service distribution, which is about as exciting as growing grass!
Normally I don't complain about the stuff that makes it to the front page, but this list is just a complete waste of absolutely everyone's time.
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
Actually as far as a medium to large organization is concerned, OpenOffice wouldn't be free in accounting terms. There would be training and admin costs on top of that -- which would initially be high. Training is expensive, and there would be a re-productivity curve for employees too, and thus a resultant increased cost again. It's probably a show stopper for many companies. While they do have to pay licences etc for MS Office, they don't really need to provide training in most corporations as Office knowledge is an expected skill to have, and most IT depts are familiar with it too.
Which brings me to the fact that the real key to having the oft-heralded Year Of Linux, is to have a Year of the Office Replacement first. (I'm not sure that Open Office is currently anywhere near that happening). MS Office / Exchange are the whole key to Microsoft's dominance, not the OS. Find a viable solution for that, and Linux will follow.
Even though the source code is ugly as sin (sorry comskip author, but it is, it's one big C file that's nearly impossible to dissect) -- a nice addition to CCExtractor is comskip.
http://www.kaashoek.com/comskip/
Android is cool but does anyone know why they took out some of the beta functionality (like being able to get driving directions which are now expressly forbidden by the terms of service for the Android google maps API key)?
It seems like it would be fairly trivial to write a turn-by-turn voice app for Android if they still had the API to request driving directions. By knowing the location of the phone the program could easily find what segment of a route it's on (if any at all), see how far it is until the next instruction and then read the instruction using the text2speech library someone has already made.
As it stands, the only way I see of implementing such an app would be to have a webserver somewhere that would forward direction requests from the phone to google using the standard google maps javascript API and then return the directions back to the app. Very much a PITA if you ask me and might violate the terms of use of developing software on Android for all I know.
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.
I really don't accept your statement that "OpenOffice wouldn't be free in accounting terms as there would be training and admin costs on top of that." Just about every office suite is basically the same, and it doesn't matter what software package that you give your people because there will "always" be training involved. The only difference here is that OpenOffice is free. I can't begin to tell you the amount of time that I had to spend training people on Microsoft Office on just the basic functions, so it wouldn't have mattered if it was OpenOffice, or Microsoft Office because most of people out there don't have a clue. Most of them don't even use any advanced features, so in reality they could just use Google Docs...but, I'd have to train them on that too;-)
We pay $400 per license for MS Office here at work.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
The list fails. Lotus Symphony isn't OSS, though it is based off OpenOffice 1. They based it off OpenOffice 1 as opposed to the trunk for 3 at the time, because IBM didn't want to have Symphony a GPL product.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
These are all projects with mainstream corporate backing.
In my opinion the list should include projects done by people who don't have vast sums of cash to back them.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Training is expensive, and there would be a re-productivity curve for employees too, and thus a resultant increased cost again.
Actually, our organization recently upgraded MS Office and had to go through the retraining costs because of those stupid "ribbon" interfaces. The newer release is rather radically different from older releases, so the issue of retraining costs is moot.
In addition to that, Open Office actually maintains a better user interface compatability with older releases of MS Office than Office itself does.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'd have to say that the most interesting "product" that I've seen this year is an electronics microcontroller platform called Arduino. It started pre-2008, but it has shot up in popularity and had a writeup in Wired this year. The board is open source (blueprints and source code are Creative Commons), and people are making a wide range of alternative form factors with special features.
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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.
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
Training? You must work in some different office to everyone else. No-one gets training in the latest weird shit MS Office pulls. I'd like evidence that such training is widespread, or even happens.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
It's the lack of that ribbon, isn't it.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Why would there be training in using Open Office? Or Microsoft Office for that matter?
I work for a company with about 90,000 employees world wide. I think our local office (300 employees) has maybe two Microsoft Office installations, and I can't remember anyone talking about getting training in either of those packages. We have, however, had training in using Lotus Notes
What next? Training in using a fucking printer? Turning on the monitor?
Granted, I work for a company insourcing tech support, but still - why would anyone need training in using another office suite than the one they're used to? If they can't work out the differences on their own in a few days, they shouldn't be using office software to begin with.
It's more than that, it's the entire ecosystem of third party stuff that's based on the assumption that Office is available. Off the top of my head, we have:
1)Export from JDE (yes this can do CSV, not nearly as useful)
2)Export from GL reporting package (no real alternative provided)
3)Addon for Excel that's basically a macro package into the JDE financial, again no ready replacement
4)Edit functionality in our Enterprise Content Management system
5)Export functionality from our fixed asset software, no alternative but raw dump
etc.
All of that could be worked through but it would be at a VERY significant cost and possibly at the cost of choosing a significantly less useful alternative. The good news is that more and more stuff is going web based, the bad is that a bunch of advanced functionality still relies on Office.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I wonder, who here has actually tried Lotus Symphony?
I have; it's part of Notes 8 which I use at work. After about two minutes of acquaintance with it, I reinstalled OOo3: They actually managed to break some things that OOo gets right (CSV import/export in Calc) and completely omit (WTF?!) other parts (Draw).
I have no idea why they would do that. But it certainly makes the whole experience more, um, Lotussy. (If only that were a good thing!)
"Good news, everyone!"
you only have to distribute your source if you're linking against other gpl code. I haven't looked at the actual product but from what i saw on their site they're just distributing an unmodified qemu with a nice gui to run it. this means that since they're not linking against it (if they are in fact doing it this way) they wouldn't need to release anything from a legal standpoint, though they do need to have some kind of notice about the license of qemu and where to get its source IIRC.
Try IBM's version.
I don't really have any problem using OpenOffice, but it's kludgey. and pretty slow.
Lotus Symphony, on the other hand, seemed very polished to me, and significantly quicker.
It's still not Office 2000/2003, but it is worlds better than the pile of excrement that is Office 2007. Which, by the way, I have not heard more than 5 people say they like, including the previous side-post.
I would even say that, personally, I like the spreadsheet application in symphony better than excel in most instances; They have quite a bit of experience with those, so it makes sense.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
I am kind of surprised that Asterisk didn't make the list. There is a complete open source revolution happening in the field of Telephony. Asterisk 1.6 has been released, and Asterisk 1.4 is very solid and not only can do everything that the conventional higher end PBXs do, but can do a lot more.
Asterisk has also inspired some other open source PBX projects. Asterisk doesn't necesarrily need to be only a IP pbx either, but in the VOIP field there are loads of exciting products that are revolutionizing telephony.
Surely one of those products is at least worth a mention instead of putting linux in the list 4 times and open office in there twice.
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