Category:Open Source
From Christoph's Personal Wiki
This category will be about all things Open Source (or Open Source Software/OSS). I will include links to and reviews of my favourite OSS projects.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
— By Eric Steven Raymond
- "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." (aka "Necessity is the mother of invention")
- "Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)."
- "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)
- "If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you."
- "When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor."
- "Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging."
- "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers."
- "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone." (aka "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" aka "Linus's Law")
- "Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around."
- "If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource."
- "The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better."
- "Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong."
- "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
- "Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected."
- "When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!"
- "When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend."
- "A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets."
- "To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you."
- "Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one."
Top OSS projects
- Wikipedia
- Firefox
- OpenOffice.org
- BitTorrent — a client application for the torrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol.
- MediaWiki
- XviD — an open-source MPEG-4 video codec.
- phpBB
- openSUSE.org — a community project, sponsored by Novell, to develop and maintain SUSE Linux.
- dyne:bolic — a LiveCD GNU/Linux distribution geared towards multimedia production with a useful assortment of applications for creative users.
- GIMP — a free software bitmap graphics editor, a program for creating and processing raster graphics.
- Apache HTTP Server
- SourceForge — a collaborative software development management system.
List of OSS projects
Below is an incomplete list of OSS projects I support and actively use:
- openSUSE.org — seeks to provide a free, open-source version of SuSE Linux.
- KDE — K Desktop Environment for Linux and Unix workstations.
- GNOME — GNOME is a Unix and Linux desktop suite and development platform.
- OpenOffice — a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project.
- Eclipse — an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software.
Graphics
- The GIMP — The GNU Image Manipulation Program.
Math
- The R Project — R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.
- Yacas — an open source, general-purpose, easy-to-use computer algebra system.
Plotting
- GnuPlot — a portable command-line driven interactive data and function plotting utility.
- Grace — a WYSIWYG 2D plotting tool for the X Window System.
Backup Software
- rsync — an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer.
Database management systems
- MySQL AB — database server.
- The phpMyAdmin Project — a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Internet.
- SQLite — a small C library that implements a self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine.
- Ghostscript — a suite of free software based on an interpreter of the Adobe PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages.
Scientific Text Editors
- LaTeX Project — a high-quality typesetting system, with features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation.
Science
- Kalzium — a periodic table of the elements for KDE.
- KStars — a planetarium program that runs under GNU/Linux and other Unix like operating systems.
Groupware
- OpenGroupware.org — a free collaborative software (groupware) server for multiple clients.
- phpBB — a popular free and open source forum system using the PHP scripting language and supporting a variety of database management systems.
- PHProjekt — PHProjekt is a modular application for the coordination of group activities and to share informations and document via intranet and internet.
Weblog systems
- WordPress — a web publishing system (a.k.a. content management system) written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database.
Image Galleries
- Gallery Project — an open source PHP project enabling simple management and publication of photographs and other digital media through a PHP-enabled Apache.
Webgrabber
- HTTrack — a free software and open source website copier and offline browser.
- Wget — a free software program that implements simple and powerful content retrieval from web servers.
- Apache HTTP Server — a free software/open source HTTP web server.
- AWStats — an open source web analytics reporting tool, suitable for analyzing data from Internet services such as web, streaming media, mail and ftp servers.
External links
- wikipedia:List of open source software packages
- OpenSourceCMS
- phpDocumentor
- Swat - Web Application Toolkit — by silverorange
- RepRap — Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is a self-copying 3D printer; a self-replicating machine.
Web applications
- MediaWiki
- WordPress
- phpBB
- phpBB Fetch All
- Smarty — PHP template engine
- phpMyAdmin — MySQL database administration tool
- phpAdsNew — Open-source ads server
- JungleDisk — an application that lets you store files and backup data securely to Amazon.com's S3(TM) Storage Service.
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