Best enterprise open-source applications announced
Infoworld does an annual review of the best enterprise open-source applications, called the BOSSies, and just announced the 2008 winners. An Infoworld editorial team makes the selections, so this isn't a matter of open-source projects rallying the troops to vote for their projects (which sometimes has odd results, though often gets things right)
- Alfresco, Content Management
- Compiere, Enterprise Resource Planning
- dotProject, Project Management
- Hyperic HQ, Application Monitoring
- Intalio BPMS, Business Process Management
- JasperReports, Reporting
- Liferay Portal, Enterprise Portal
- Magento eCommerce, E-Commerce
- Pentaho Open BI Suite, Business Intelligence
- SugarCRM, Customer Relationship Management
Other categories include the best open-source productivity applications, best open-source middleware, and other categories. You can see the full details here or a snapshot view of the winners over on OStatic.
One nit? I don't like that CentOS was listed as the top open-source operating system. True, it wasn't listed in the enterprise category, but CentOS (which is just Red Hat Enterprise Linux without Red Hat's trademarks) is, in my mind, the worst sort of open source: It sucks money out of the system while giving nothing back. CentOS contributes no innovation to the Linux kernel and instead makes it harder for companies like Red Hat and Novell to invest in research and development.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I'm sorry but I don't think you get the joke. Sure, the developers themselves don't contribute to the kernel as part of their CentOS work - but hey, that's the *whole point* of CentOS, they strive to be compatible with RHEL.
Consider this - after the Red Hat Linux/Fedora split, there was one piece of the market missing for RH, which is long-term-support, no-cost OS. In almost every environment, you want this, either on scratch test servers, development machines or whatnot. At the same time, you don't want these machines to run completely different distro. The point being, I'm sure RH is actually grateful for CentOS.
And, to give an example, my university is 100% CentOS on desktops and mostly RHEL on servers (we have some commercial apps, like Oracle, and we need to run them on a supported OS) If there was no CentOS, I'm sure we'd look for another distribution altogether, thus ditching the RHELs.
The CentOS guys are doing a little work stripping and replacing (at Red Hat's explicit insistence) any copyrighted material such as images or icon-sets as well as any reference to Red Hat whatsoever. Then they compile and package everything in a downloadable ISO and provide the server to download from.
Now, given the requirements of the GPL (and given the amount of software that's non-GPL in any given distro including x.org) when Red Hat only give the compiled RHEL to paying customers they only have to make some of the source code available to those same customers so if they had a problem with CentOS they could easily just pull the publically available source code to the entire kit and kaboodle and put it behind a password locked site.
As it is, Red Hat won't give it any obvious approval but the only thing they've done is to insist that the CentOS site and package remove any and all reference to Red Hat and RHEL. Either it's their usual high level of protectiveness over their trademark, because they don't want the support calls or both but outside of that they don't have any problem with CentOS. So, if Red Hat has no problem with this, why should Matt?
- by douglasdooley August 4, 2008 11:19 PM PDT
- It would have been nice to see Glassfish win if there were an application server category, am i to assume that this is not even worthy or reviewable by Infoworld's esteemed analysts?...
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