How To Tell Open-Source Winners From Losers

An anonymous reader writes "There are 139,834 open-source projects under way on SourceForge. IWeek wonders which projects will make lasting contributions, and which will fizzle. Sure, Linux, Apache, and MySQL are winners, but what about OpenVista, FLOSSmole, and Hyperic HQ? What's your list of open-source winners and losers?"

Re:OpenVista?

[AKAImBatman]

VistA is a medical tracking system. OpenVistA is an OSS implementation.

Re:OpenVista?

[sconeu]

And it's actually OpenVistA. Note the trailing upper case.

1. It's from the US.gov
2. It's been around since 2003.

Clarification

[Bogtha]

One of the PostgreSQL developers quoted in the article feels this article is inaccurate in some ways [ittoolbox.com].

Re:Seconded. Numbers != success

[DaveV1.0]

That is just the thing. A 25% market share of your target audience is good. The thing is most OSS apps don't have even a 10% market share.

Another thing that I see is FLOSS apps that are in perpetual beta, that never make it to 1.0. If something has been around for 3 or 5 years, one would think it would be v1.0. Instead, what we see is v0.93.4223587234856852837501613. At some point, it has to be finished.

Re:Winners

[c41rn]

There is a free Acrobat Reader alternative called "Foxit" [foxitsoftware.com], but alas, it is not open source. I gave it a try a few months ago and it was snappier than Acrobat Reader but it didn't play nice with Firefox. It looks like it's been updated since then, so YMMV.

Re:Ending a project is (was) not that easy.

[spectrokid]

That is by design. Open source means you give away your sourcecode, now matter how insignificant. There is always a (very) small chance somebody takes over where you left. So the work you did should not be deleted. It is part of the SF experience...

Those that provide an alternative to closed source

[cjmt]

The big winners (to me) are those projects who provide a viable or better alternative to available closed source software and those that you'd put into a business and trust to "just work". To find them you need to test, test and test some more. My winners, those that spring to mind immediately as being trusted not to embarrass me, are

• mOnOwall [m0n0.ch] - firewalling
• IPCop [ipcop.org] - firewalling
• Metadot [metadot.com] - CMS
• Apache [apache.org] - web server
• Bind [isc.org] - Name Server
• asterisk [asterisk.org] - telephony/voip
• Sendmail [sendmail.org] - cussed but stable MTA
• SpamAssassin [apache.org] - spam filtering
• MIME-Defang [mimedefang.org] - email content filtering/manipulation
• ClamAV [clamav.net] - Virus filtering
• Freebsd [freebsd.org] - the best OS since sliced bread (IMHO)
• Centos [centos.org] - Not to shabby an OS either
• ...

The other winners are those that are used everyday as part of the tools to do the job and never really thought about. Nmap, vim, perl, portupgrade, cvsup and many more.

Re:Ending a project is (was) not that easy.

[DJK]

http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?doci d=14041&group_id=1#project [sourceforge.net]

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[itwerx]

SQL-ledger [sql-ledger.com] is a good bookkeeping package (and a whole lot more) and SugarCRM [sugarcrm.com] can handle the CRM side of things. There's even some glue scripts out there to keep the client info sync'd between them.

I'd also add Zimbra [zimbra.com] to the list of very good non-SourceForge projects. However, to be fair, the original poster was referring mostly to word of mouth being the primary source of info, nothing in the post said, "anything not on SourceForge is te suxors!"

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Vengeance_au]

In regards to CRM - I've been using sugarCRM [sugarcrm.com] for about 6 months and its been rock solid, with pretty much everything I need to run a quickly growing business. Nice and robust, good forums of users willing to help, and a number of hosters offer it as a one-click include. I found it via the magic google query of ["open source" crm] - just like I found the reporting tool (jasperReports) via ["open source" reporting].

I only ever search through sourceforge, freshmeat etc when I have a name of software that I am specifically searching for - otherwise I find you end up wading through 100's of apps that are abandoned, alpha, etc. I do believe those sites serve a useful purpose, just not as the first point to search.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[anomalous cohort]

I'm a big fan of http://plone.org/ [plone.org] which is a CMS that sits on top of the http://www.zope.org/ [zope.org] application server. All of which is OSS. I can't speak to OSS CRM but others here have. There are plenty of fantastic server side developer productivity boosting OSS software out there.

• Try http://jakarta.apache.org/ [apache.org] for lots of Java libraries.
• I find http://www.springframework.org/ [springframework.org] is a great framework extension for Java.
• I like spring better, but http://www.hibernate.org/ [hibernate.org] provides an ORM for both Java and .NET developers.
• If you are working in Perl, then http://www.cpan.org/ [cpan.org] is the place for you.

When it comes to client side software there is a huge amount of great OSS apps.

• I believe that http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganttproject/ [sourceforge.net] is great for project management.
• I have used http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/ [sourceforge.net] for years and know it to be a great mind mapping tool.
• I believe that http://live.gnome.org/Dia/ [gnome.org] is a great diagramming tool.
• I'm a big fan of http://www.umlet.com/ [umlet.com] and find it to be very useful for creating UML diagrams.
• I switched from sodipodi to http://www.inkscape.org/ [inkscape.org] which is fantastic for drawing vector images.
• I am also a big fan of http://www.gimp.org/ [gimp.org] which is used to draw raster images.

I have used all of these projects for years and would most definitely label them as quality, winner OSS.

Re:Nice list. With one bummer.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just it: The Blender GUI IS easy to use. It's just not so easy to learn for the first time. I've never encountered another interface in my 25+ years of computer use that was more focused than Blender's interface on both getting out of your way, and exposing as much functionality as possible to within easy reach. The interface was designed from the ground-up for speed of execution, (and customization for a given task, which is where the OpenGL stuff comes in) making it the most efficient modeling interface of any 3D app out there -- which is what another poster in this thread was talking about when he said he'd won a number of modeling contests thanks to Blender. Learning its interface is a one-time investment with a big payoff in speed.

  3D modeling is vastly more difficult to learn for the first time than the Blender interface, so I don't see why people will gladly invest effort in the one but complain about the other. It took me about an hour and a half to get basic familiarity with Blender's interface, and a few days to get comfortable with it.. OTOH, months later I'm still a beginner at 3D modeling. (Maybe 3d software should have a "be a great artist" button, eh? Heh!)