Rob's Blog

30/1: Open Source

These days you can find quality open source software for practically everything.  A notable example is  Open Office which provides an alternative to MS Office.  In each category of software, there are open source options and often the quality of the open source option is remarkably high.

Open Source Software is governed by a variety of licences and you need to ensure that you comply with the licence terms particularly if you wish to modify the software or incorporate it into your own products.  If you are new to open source, there is a good article on IBM's site which explains a lot of the terminology here.

A great place to check out what is available is SourceForge.net.  This site is used by many of the open source developers and has links to the individual home pages for each software title.  Look for applications that have high download or activity ratings or for applications that already have a stable development status.  One way to judge an application is to check whether there is a thriving discussion forum or whether bugs are being reported and cleared.

There is a good article advising how to go about choosing an open source Content Management System (CMS) here.

The open source community is quite closely tied into the Linux OS.  This is because Linux itself is open source.  However, most of the open source applications work equally well on Windows.  You just need to select the right file to download.  This means that if your organisation is contemplating a shift to Linux, you could start by using Windows versions of applications that also work on Linux.  When the time comes to migrate to Linux, the applications will look and feel the same.

Implementation, training and ongoing support can usually be purchased if required but this is not necessary if you have the skills required in-house.

Some notable examples of open source software that I have used or am contemplating:

If you don't like the cost of MS Office and being forced to upgrade hardware to support all the new features, try OpenOffice.org.  This is the open source version of StarOffice.org.

If you're looking for an ERP solution that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, consider evaluating Compiere.  You would need to decide upon a database application to use first (probably Oracle although there are now alternatives).

If you need to use a database, the choice of database may be dictated by the application that you wish to use.  However, if you are developing your own application you should consider MySQL, PostgreSQL or OpenQM.

If you need to create PDF files from your applications, then get PDF Creator.  It is a printer driver that creates PDF files.

And for those of you that use Lotus Notes/Domino, Open Source can apply.  Just as some open source applications run under the Windows operating system, others run as Lotus Notes applications.  Take a look at OpenNTF.org.

In a future article, I'll try and cover other open source offerings including operating systems, web servers and development languages.  But for now, remember that all the time the choices available and the quality of those choices is getting bigger and better.  We are all in a stronger position as a result.