Category:Open Source

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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

  1. "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." (aka "Necessity is the mother of invention")
  2. "Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)."
  3. "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)
  4. "If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you."
  5. "When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor."
  6. "Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging."
  7. "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers."
  8. "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")
  9. "Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around."
  10. "If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource."
  11. "The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better."
  12. "Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong."
  13. "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)
  14. "Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected."
  15. "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!"
  16. "When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend."
  17. "A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets."
  18. "To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you."
  19. "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

  1. Wikipedia
  2. Firefox
  3. OpenOffice.org
  4. BitTorrent — a client application for the torrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol.
  5. MediaWiki
  6. XviD — an open-source MPEG-4 video codec.
  7. phpBB
  8. openSUSE.org — a community project, sponsored by Novell, to develop and maintain SUSE Linux.
  9. dyne:bolic — a LiveCD GNU/Linux distribution geared towards multimedia production with a useful assortment of applications for creative users.
  10. GIMP — a free software bitmap graphics editor, a program for creating and processing raster graphics.
  11. Apache HTTP Server
  12. 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.

PDF

  • 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.

Web-related

  • 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

Web applications

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