2008 Best of Open Source Software

The Infoworld had selected this year best open source software under eight categories covering business and productivity applications, development tools, middleware, networking, security, and storage. They have chosen 60 products.

Among the easy picks for this year’s winners were OpenOffice.org for office productivity suite, Snort for network intrusion detection, and Splunk for security log analysis. Although, these applications were already believed to be solutions ahead of their competition, InfoWorld’s editors, analysts, reviewers really had a difficult time choosing between other solutions in all eight categories that included the following: enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP, BI, and reporting; collaborative applications, including mail/calendar, wiki, and social networking; desktop productivity apps from office suites to 3-D modeling; platforms and middleware, including operating systems, databases, virtualization, and SOA integration; developer tools from AJAX and rich Internet apps to Web service testing and version control; networking, including server monitoring, routing, Wi-Fi scanning, and VoIP software; security software, including firewall, IDS, disk encryption, and security testing; and storage which includes monitoring and administration, backup, and NAS.

Three sun products won the awards in two different categories: My SQL as best database and the recently acquired VirtualBox as best desktop virtualization both under the Best of Open Source Platforms and Middle category and OpenOffice.org as best productivity suite under Best of Open Source Productivity Apps category.

A partial list of the winners as listed in the InfoWorld website is as follows:

Best of open source in productivity applications

Audacity, Sound Editing
Blender, 3D Modeling
Firefox, Web Browser
GIMP, Image Editing
OpenOffice.org, Productivity Suite

PDFCreator, PDF Creation

Best of open source in enterprise applications

Alfresco Community, Content Management
Compiere, Enterprise Resource Planning
dotProject, Project Management
Hyperic HQ, Application Monitoring
Intalio BPMS, Business Process Management
JasperReports, Reporting
Liferay Portal, Enterprise Portal
Magento eCommerce, E-Commerce
Pentaho Open BI Suite, Business Intelligence

SugarCRM, Customer Relationship Management

Best of open source in collaboration

Elgg, Social Networking
MediaWiki, Wiki
VNC and Chicken of the VNC, Remote Control
Scalix, Mail and Calendar

WordPress, Blog Publishing

Best of open source in networking

Asterisk, IP Telephony
AWStats, Log File Analyzer
InSSIDer, Wireless Network Scanner
Nagios, Server Monitoring
NDISwrapper, Wireless Network Interface
Vyatta, Router, Firewall, & VPN
Wireshark, Network Protocol Analyzer

Zenoss Core, Network Monitoring

Best of open source in platforms and middleware

CentOS, Server Operating System
JBossESB, Enterprise Service Bus
MySQL, Database
phpMyAdmin, MySQL Administration
Puppy Linux, Small-Footprint OS
Talend Open Studio, Data Integration
Ubuntu, Desktop Operating System
VirtualBox, Desktop Virtualization

Xen, Server Virtualization

Best of open source in security

AppArmor, Application Security
Metasploit Framework, Penetration Toolkit
Ophcrack, Password Cracker
SmoothWall Express, Network Firewall
Snort with BASE, Network Intrusion Detection
Splunk, Security Log Analysis
TrueCrypt, Disk Encryption

Untangle Gateway Platform, Gateway Security

For complete coverage and the rest of the winners see the article at InfoWold.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/08/04/32TC-bossies-2008_1.html