Best of Open Source

nellyshark

Hi all,

I was thinking that this thread needs a "best of" Open Source list with explanations. By this I mean Best of:
Content Management System = Joomla (easy to use)
Web Browser = Firefox (safer than IE)
Word Processor = Open Office (Excellent alternative to Word)

etc.

Also a list of "have to have" Open Source applications and utilities would be really interesting.

Orion

Not quite sure if you mean windows or Linux compatible but here's some that are for both:

CMS: Drupal
Productivity: Open Office
Image processing: GIMP
File Compression: 7Zip
Movie Player: VLC
Remote Desktop: TightVNC
FTP: FileZilla
Web browsing: Firefox or Opera (not open source but free)
CD Ripping: Cdex
Web Design: NVU

croo

I have a connection so I'm hardly unbiased but ...
Best ERP - Adempiere - the only true peer based development in the OS ERP space!

I have a dislike of OS projects that have crippled OS "community" versions and paid for "professional" versions but a couple that fit the description but are still useful are:

CRM - SugarCRM

Project Planning - OpenProj. If you need to read MS Project document but don't want to buy OpenProj can read MS project files. It has no resource levelling (you need the commercial on demand version for that ) but it's better than nothing!

UML diagramming - ArgoUML (although I like the integration of UML digramming with Netbeans)

Art Work - Inkscape

nellyshark

Any ideas on the best eCommerce solution?

I have had varying arguements with people over the last while regarding this personally I like OS Commerce.

I have often though whether it would be feasible for an organisation to function properly entirely using OS apps.

oscarBravo

Macros42 wrote: »

Web browsing: Firefox or Opera (not open source but free)

Let's keep it to open source only, ta.

croo

nellyshark wrote: »

Any ideas on the best eCommerce solution?

Adempiere has a basic eShop included but as I say it's very basic yet ... but there is a new eShop under development! But even so, if I was after a pure eCommerce solution I like OfBiz a lot! I have just glanced at OS Commerce and it struck me as *looking* just like a basic OfBiz setup? is there a relationship does anyone know?
I haven't implemented either and it's really only then that you see the pluses & minuses ... but I have looked through the OfBiz code and was impressed. But it might be getting dated now ... I haven't looked in a while and they did become an the Apache foundation incubator project so perhaps they have modernised to use new standard persistence engines, workflow & rules engines etc... Also it's more a (very detailed) framework than an out of the box solution!

nellyshark

Macros42 wrote: »

Web Design: NVU

Just regarding NVU, is Kompozer and NVU the same?

croo

nellyshark wrote: »

is Kompozer and NVU the same?

I think kompozer is a community fork!?

from http://kompozer.net/about/

Why call it «KompoZer» instead of «Nvu»?
Because « Nvu and the Nvu logo are trademarks of Linspire Inc. »
As Linspire stopped the development of Nvu, there is no legal way to correct any bug in Nvu.

nellyshark

croo wrote: »

I think kompozer is a community fork!?

Fork is the word I was looking for. In a number of OS projects I have noticed that there are forks.

Are forks generally better or worse than the original or are some members of the project unhappy with direction of the project and go their own way.

Thanks.

croo

The reasons for a fork can vary greatly and probably deserves a thread all in its own right ... if there isn't one already in the history of this forum?

But, from reading the FAQ on the Kompozer wesbite, for example, they explain the forked VNU because they had no options. They had found & fixed bugs but Linspire who owns the VNU trademark did not wish to accept their enhancements and was no longer maintaining the application itself so the only option open was to fork.

In my own experience with Adempiere & Compiere we forked because there was a strong community supplying support & patches but nothing from our work would be integrated into Compiere even though the bugs we were finding & fixing were not being fixed by Compiere. And perhaps, more importantly, there were binary releases made but without accompanying source code ... unless you were a paid customer.

I think many companies are seeing open source as a marketing strategy. Much like shareware was many years ago. They see it as a way of getting a product which does 80% of the task out to their target audience ... then they charge for the last 20% as a "professional" version. This is becoming more and more common and is something I really hate to see. Another approach is they release buggy beta code for their community to test then supply "service packs" to their paid customers only. So the community helps QA test & debug it and gets no return.

You know it takes a lot to develop code, but it takes as much or more to QA it... in my opinion those that test contribute as much to the overall product as those actually coding. Likewise for those community members offering free support to new comers to bring them up to speed so they too can contribute.

Interestingly, Brian Behlendorf, co-founder and president of the Apache Software Foundation believes of Open Source "the most important requirement is the right to fork"
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/11/17/001117hnapache.html

By the way the full name of the Ademiere project is the Adempiere Bazaar and the reason for this is in the Eric S. Raymond's essay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
If you have an interest in open source and haven't read it a very interesting read... actually if if you are not an open source fan it's a very interesting read!

Other forks I know off...
Mambo->Joomla
sugarCRM-> vTiger (which doesn't seem to have taken off)

Orion

oscarBravo wrote: »

Let's keep it to open source only, ta.

FF is OS. I just threw in Opera as an free alternative but I did mention that it's not OS. All the others are afaik.

Orion

nellyshark wrote: »

Any ideas on the best eCommerce solution?

I have had varying arguements with people over the last while regarding this personally I like OS Commerce..

I friend of mine set up an online business using osCommerce. It's fully scalable and friendly. The business eventually folded but that was no reflection on the software

Orion

croo wrote: »

But, from reading the FAQ on the Kompozer wesbite, for example, they explain the forked VNU because they had no options. They had found & fixed bugs but Linspire who owns the VNU trademark did not wish to accept their enhancements and was no longer maintaining the application itself so the only option open was to fork.

Didn't know that. How does Kompozer work in Gnome? And does it have all the same features as NVU?

oscarBravo

Macros42 wrote: »

FF is OS. I just threw in Opera as an free alternative but I did mention that it's not OS. All the others are afaik.

Yup, and I was clarifying the distinction. This forum is for discussing Free (as in speech) software, aka Open Source. Free (as in beer) software is something that's too often confused with OS, and I'm making sure we keep the distinction.

Orion

Oh I agree with you - don't get me wrong. Hence my qualification about Opera not being FOSS.

I draw the distinguished gentleman's attention to : http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=223101

It's my fault the forum is here for you to mod

Orion

Actually on this note:
" Why call it «KompoZer» instead of «Nvu»?
Because « Nvu and the Nvu logo are trademarks of Linspire Inc. »
As Linspire stopped the development of Nvu, there is no legal way to correct any bug in Nvu."

NVU is free and open source but if it's not possible to develop it due to a trademark is it true open source? I wasn't aware of the background to this before this thread. I'm not a fan of Linspire's policies overall and wasn't aware that they maintain a trademark on nvu. I think I'll be removing it and trying out Kompozer instead.

An (admittedly extreme) analogy would be M$ providing their source code to developers so that they could develop compatible apps but not amend the source itself.

IMO (if this is the case) then it's not Open Source but merely 'source available'. Open means Open to me.

croo

Macros42 wrote: »

NVU is free and open source but if it's not possible to develop it due to a trademark is it true open source?

Actually I think this is more common than might be thought.
Many commercial open source solutions use licenses that restrict distribution. One example that I had experience of was the Compiere Public License (CPL) ... this was basically a Mozilla License but with added clauses making it illegal to use the compiere name & logo without permission BUT also disallowed the removal of these! So in effect you could not legally distribute a modified version without Compiere Inc.'s permission. The license was supposedly OSI certified so a UK based member of Adempiere challenged this and Compiere changed their license rather than loose OSI certification. But I have seen other such OS licenses...

EKRIUQ

nellyshark wrote: »

Any ideas on the best eCommerce solution?

I have had varying arguements with people over the last while regarding this personally I like OS Commerce.

I have often though whether it would be feasible for an organisation to function properly entirely using OS apps.

I use Zen-Cart bit easier to customise than OS commerce but has a great support forum would'ent use anything else.

Just discovered Joomla for content management and am blow away with its features and free templates

the_syco

Browser: Firefox
Converter (of video files): Super (it's a user-friendly GUI of lots of other free decoders & encoders)
Text Views: "TRWNfoDiz", followed by "Damn Nfo viewer"
Torrents: uTorrent

thebman

Utorrent isn't open source, Azureus is the OS torrent client that is most popular IMO.

I still use Utorrent over it as it rocks more TBH :-/

croo

Browser: Firefox
Converter (of video files): Super (it's a user-friendly GUI of lots of other free decoders & encoders)
Text Views: "TRWNfoDiz", followed by "Damn Nfo viewer"
Torrents: uTorrent

Utorrent isn't open source, Azureus is the OS torrent client that is most popular IMO.

And Super dc is freeware
TRWNfoDiz is shareware? but not sure.
DAMN NFO Viewer is freeware
So it seems the_syco hasn't grasp the distinction between free & open source!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_Libre

PogMoThoin

I'm running Torrentflux b4rt, Coppermine Photo Gallery and a phpBB forum on my ubuntu webserver for playin round with

Torrentflux b4rt is great, not alone does it do torrents (which I've practically given up as I cba seeding) but also does nzb's and wgets. Great to have a central download location, line them up and start them before I goto bed.

thebman

I've not tried this but the other thread was locked about Spotify.

Anyway there is now an open source client for it available below.

It does not support free accounts as they have not implemented the ad support so will only work with premium accounts at the moment.

http://despotify.se/

democrates

Just a thought, seems to me the wiki would be useful for this kind of list
http://wiki.boards.ie/wiki/Board:Open_Source
it's just a stub at the moment, is there a reason not to start putting more static kind of information in there?

Meanwhile a handy online list is http://directory.fsf.org/ and not forgetting http://www.osalt.com/

robobobo

Gimp is an excellent image editing program

dueyfinster

Browsing: Firefox / Chrome (Linux version is shaping up well)
Music: Amarok
Torrents: KTorrent / Transmission
Video/Torrents/Podcasts: Miro
Virtualisation: Sun VirtualBox
Code IDE: Eclipse (Netbeans no.2)
Video (On Windows): VLC
Media Centre: Boxee / MythTV (For card support)
Messaging: Empathy

I'll second 7-Zip (on Windows); but Mambo/Joomla? Junk! Wordpress is where it's at!

gcdwebmaster

My favs are

Graphics - GIMP
IDE - eclipse
Editor - vim
Telnet Client - Putty
SCP - WinSCP
FTP Client - FileZilla
Zip - 7-zip
CMS - Silverstripe (now opensource) recently I was using it and I liked it.
Office - OpenOffice
Generating PDFs - PDFCreator
TeX - MiKTeX

random.stranger

I found audacity great for dealing with audio files. It allows you to divide one file into several, delete portions, blank out parts with white noise. Simple user interface & you can download an add-on for MP3 encoding.

lucideer

Graphics: Inkscape usually, GIMP if I can be arsed waiting for the bloody thing to open.
FTP: FileZilla
Server: Apache (XAMPP)
Archiving: 7-Zip
Web development: Opera Dragonfly
Messing with music: Ardour (Linux only, got this with UbuntuStudio - really really cúl app)

Other notables:
WinPcap
MiKTeX
sqlite

...
This is terrible, I used to be a FOSS nut. Where's all my FOSS gone...

Orion

lucideer wrote: »

Graphics: Inkscape usually, GIMP if I can be arsed waiting for the bloody thing to open.

How long does Gimp take for you? I just opened it and it took 3 seconds.

lucideer

Macros42 wrote: »

How long does Gimp take for you? I just opened it and it took 3 seconds.

Too long. It's quicker if I disable font and brush, but for some reason the reparse font-list functionality is broken for me in the last two updates.

Either way though, no app should take this long to open, even if it is loading fonts....

Just timed it there now by restarting (had it open) - took 8 seconds. Way way quicker than usual.

gcdwebmaster

I like the look of Piwik as an alternative to google analytics
http://piwik.org/

random.stranger

Hey,
is there anything out there for editing DVD's? when i set up a number of programs to copy from my sky+ box to dvd, it records it in a mixed up order.

I was wondering are there any GNU/GPL programs out there that I could put the dvdrw I recorded from sky+ & tidy up the order of programs. It would also be handy for dividing home videos into chapters etc.

thebman

You could use movie maker and the built in DVD burner in windows.

Open source video editor:
http://www.cinefx.org/cinefx/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_editing_software#Open_source_freeware

And a program called DVD styler to create DVD menus etc...
http://www.dvdstyler.de/index.php?option=com_morfeoshow&task=view&gallery=1&Itemid=61&lang=en

random.stranger

Nice one. Thanks thebman