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FLOSS Catalogue and SME Guide
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Carlo Daffara of Conecta, with the help of Roberto Galoppini of Acme Solutions and Pamela Jones of GrokLaw, has recently published the FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) guide consisting of an introduction and catalogue of open source software useful to SME organizations. Actually, the catalogue is helpful to organizations of all sizes and types, listing and describing open source software by category, as so.
- Infrastructural software
- ERP/CRM
- Groupware
- Document management
- Content management systems
- VoIP, conferencing and messaging
- Graphics and CAD
- Desktop
- Engineering and manufacturing
- Vertical business applications
- Elearning applications
The FLOSS Guide and Catalogue first came across my feed reader in a post by Roberto Galoppini but there was so much information there that I set it aside and never got back to it. It took a recent email exchange with Roberto to remind me to return to it.
This catalogue is very useful. We discovered 5 open source solutions related to data management & analytics that we hadn't found before. We've added DBDesigner 4, RKWard, Apatar, Jitterbit, Power*Matchmaker to the list of open source solutions that we track.
Of the 50-plus projects that we've been following for the past few years, the FLOSS catalogue only lists FirebirdSQL (Infrastructure), MySQL (Infrastructure), PostgreSQL (Infrastructure) [née and once again Postrgres], R Project (Engineering and Manufacturing), Pentaho (Vertical Business Applications), SnapLogic (Vertical Business Applications), and Talend (Vertical Business Applications).
You can find all of the above in our linkblog in the side column.
We also saw SAPDb/MaxDB in the catalogue, but need to learn more about it, and its suitability for DW before we add it. MaxDB is the database management system developed and supported by SAP AG. It has its focus on the requirements of SAP customers and SAP applications and can be used as a less expensive alternative to databases from other vendors for your own or third-party applications as well. It will be interesting to see if MaxDB is optimized in any way for reporting, OLAP, data mining or other BI analytics, now that SAP is adding Business Objects to its portfolio.
While many of the projects that we follow are small, new or somewhat obscure, we were surprised that SpagoBI and Spagic, JasperSoft, Ingres, LucidDB, Weka, Mondrian, Mule, KETTLE, jPivot, PALO and the BEE Project, were missing. Perhaps Carlo can get them into the next edition. 
Roberto, thank you for getting me back to the FLOSS Catalogue and Guide. It's great stuff.
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2 comments
The catalog is oriented towards SMEs with a focus on complete products, and so we have not included tools like jPivot. We will include Ingres in the next edition, along with some more tools for BI; as for SAPDb, it is not specifically designed for OLAP or BI, but does provide very good self-tuning properties that make it a good all-purpose, enterprise level DB.
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