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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
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.
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.
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;-)
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.
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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.
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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!)
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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.
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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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