Reflecting the growing taste for open source solutions, InfoWorld's annual Best of Open Source Software Awards for 2012 (Bossie 2012) has grown in scope to include more than 100 products cited for excellence. These products are in seven categories, as Peter Wayner of InfoWorld explains, extending from application development tools to "games and other fun stuff." The categories include:

• The best open source applications
• The best open source application development tools
• The best open source data center and cloud software
• The best open source databases
• The best open source desktop applications
• The best open source networking and security software
• Now for something completely different

Wayner enumerates the several trends at work in the FOSS world, beginning with Hadoop, which he calls "a stack of code for those who need to do big things with data spread out across a rack of nodes," noting that its Google progenitors now eye their offspring enviously. Alongside Hadoop and the solutions it has spawned are new approaches to database management. The players in this arena -- alternatives to MySQL -- include Couchbase, Cassandra, and MongoDB, solutions that deliver scalability and performance by trading off the customary capabilities of the traditional relational database. Developments involving the private cloud continue as well. There such solutions as OpenStack, Eucalyptus, and CloudStack have sprung from public cloud innovations tailored to the requirements of the individual enterprise. Innovation has moved off the desktop and into everything from automobile manufacture to the garment industry, Wayner observes, citing such solutions as AutoAP, which can turn a wireless router into a node in a self-organizing network (and perhaps ultimately deliver users from bondage to an ISP); XBMC, novel set-top box software; the Arduino hardware project, which is making its mark on everything from clothing to coffeemakers to model airplanes and even house plants. Developers have created Apertus Axiom, a design for a complex video camera; DStar, an open source ham radio solution; and Zoybar, devoted to creating open source musical instruments and applications. Clearly, the FOSS horizons are limitless.

More Information

Proprietary Vendors Finding Open Source Development an Attractive Course

Read More ... [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter