The concept of open source is perfectly American. Its foundation is built on people sharing a knowledge base and working together to create a better end product. The movement's success finally is taking a strong foothold, and now it seems no matter where users, administrators or developers turn, there is a useful, viable open-source solution waiting – and all are free!
So many credible contributions have been made that it now is time to rank these opportunities and offer the top seven open-source solutions available today for businesses and personal users. If you have not encountered these solutions yet, you soon will.
-- Ubuntu (operating system): Ubuntu is a community developed, Linux-based operating system used in enterprise and personal environments for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the necessary applications, including a Web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software and instant messaging. And for administrators, this OS lacks much of the “bulk” weighing down these solutions yet, you soon will.
-- Wiki (project): A wiki is a collaborative Web site that can be edited by anyone with access to it. Most users have experience with the popular encyclopedia-based wiki called Wikipedia; however, a wiki has important uses within the private, corporate structure as a broad-based communications tool between employees, clients and vendors.
-- Firefox (Web browser/Internet application): Mozilla Firefox is a free, cross-platform, graphical Web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and volunteers. This W3C compliant application helps users overcome the pitfalls of other proprietary Internet navigation tools.
-- Asterisk (telephony): Asterisk is the most-widely known open-source PBX solution for VoIP telephony. It is a viable (and affordable) alternative to POTS, with broad technical support bases available online for administrators.
-- OpenOffice (word-processing suite): This office-productivity suite is comparable to MS Office, without the hefty price tag. OpenOffice comes with Writer - a word processor; Calc - a spreadsheet; and, Impress - a presentation package. Its documents can be viewed, modified and re-saved inside and out of the proprietary MS Office suite, so productivity and individual licensing are not issues.
-- PHP (programming/coding): Perl Hypertext Preprocessor, or PHP, is a scripting language that allows web developers to create dynamic content that interacts with databases. PHP applications most commonly are used with Linux servers and MySQL databases. The language provides servers with functionality similar to that provided to the Windows platform by Active Server Pages technology.
-- Zimbra Collaboration Suite (e-mail): This high-powered collaboration suite for e-mail and calendaring comes in two versions: open source, which is unsupported; and, closed source, which contains commercially supported components. The system's user interface includes tool tips, draggable items and right-click menus. It also includes search capabilities and date relations. The Zimbra server can run on a variety of open-source distributions, as well as Mac OSX.
Aaron Wittersheim is president of Whoast Inc., a Chicago based search engine marketing firm. For more information, visit http://www.whoast.com
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