Commercial Open Source Software

Unless you are looking for popular popular open source software - such as the ones available in the SourceForge top downloads or the few ones backed by vendors like Apache, Linux, MySQL, PHP, eMule, GIMP, OpenOffice or VLC, Google search might not be your best solution to find specific open source software to suit your needs.

For example, if you search for an open source web editor on Google, you won’t find BlueGriffon, a web editor based on the Firefox rendering engine Gecko (a tool I recommend to try either if you are an experienced or a beginner web author).

Looking at Facebook,  Twitter and LinkedIn lists of favorite open-source tools, it is clear that these OSS tools are definitely not something the average person has ever heard of.

The key point here is that to find the right open source tool may not be a trivial task, but anyone can learn how to do it on his own.

In this MasterNewMedia guide, open source software expert Roberto Galoppini, author of SOS Open Source, a pragmatic methodology to find and evaluate open source software, provides you with the basic pointers, resources and evaluation criteria to start looking on your own.

Read the full article at MasterNewMedia.

Open Source software selection starts with the creation of a short-list of open source packages, and the very next step is the evaluation of all candidates.
Read the dogfood label first.

Open source projects are planned, developed and maintained often using accessible Revision Control systems (e.g. Bazaar, CVS, Git, Mercurial or SVN), Collaboration (blogs, forums, IRC channels, mailing-lists and wikis) and Tracking Systems (e.g. bugzilla, GNATS, OTRS, trac). Despite going through them all can be time-consuming, those are the primary source of information to know more about an open source project.

Read more about evaluate open source software at SOS Open Source.

SourceForge few days ago served its 4 billionth download and today launched the new website. The new UI is the answer to inputs from project administrators asking for an easier path for users to download their software.

I asked Jon Sobel, SourceForge Inc. Group President, his opinion about this change:

Continue reading ‘SourceForge New Site On Line!’

SourceForge just launched the 2009 Community Choice Awards, the fourth edition is open to all FOSS projects, and it includes new categories like “Best Project for Government” and “Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything”.

Nominations will be accepted until May 29th, and the ten projects with the most nominations in each category will become finalists. Last year  OpenOffice.org won three different awards, let’s see if it will win again.