Three Most Important Open Source Projects
By JAdP on January 25th, 2007
In Computers and Internet, Open Source
As we've noted in our OSBI Daily links for yesterday and today [wiki archive or lens archive], two events are showing the growing importance of open source solutions. The first is a survey being conducted by Nat Torkington. The second is the inclusion of several open source enterprise software packages in the 17th Annual Jolt Award nominations.
... "a theory and I need numbers to prove or disprove it. If you use open source, please tell me in the comments what you think are the three most important open source projects going today. I'll post my hypothesis, the numbers, and my conclusion next week."
-- Nat Torkington in Survey: Three Most Important Open Source Projects at O'Reilly Radar
The open source BI suite, Pentaho, and the open source ESB, Mule, are included in the Jolt award nominations. I've included these two, as well as the open source and SaaS collaboration and messaging suite Zimbra, as my three "picks" for Nat's survey. It's a tough choice; there are many competing and complementary projects that fit as well. Any of the open source BI solutions that we track for our OSBI research could be a top three choice. Just take a look at our linkblog or the link modules on our lens. In bringing collaboration to all, Alfresco and other ECM open source projects may have as much impact as Zimbra or open source competitors to Microsoft Exchange such as Open-Xchange Server.
Most of the choices in the close to 200 responses that Nat had received when I made this trackback are more of the infrastructure and developer tool variety. I think that open source solutions have moved well beyond that niche, and that the open source movement is ready to capitalize on the explosion in open source projects, VC funding and businesses that occurred in 2004 through 2006. This mini-bubble is contracting a bit leading to some consolidation and a lot of stability in business models and business growth, and in community definition, contribution and support. At the same time, controversy still abounds around licensing [GPLv3 and MPL+Attribution] and what commercial open source really means. But it's all good, and it all indicates that the open source movement is maturing.
What are your choices for the three most important open source projects? Get over to O'Reilly Radar and make your opinion heard.
