Find The Boots

Rantings from a few corporate types about life, technology, travel, guns, politics, and everything good in the world.

Open source's hottest 10 apps

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Slashdot did a story on open source's hottest 10 apps as told by ITWire. The most downloaded open source apps on SourceForge were:

1. eMule (2,250,156 downloads)
2. Ares Galaxy (1,314,665)
3. Azureus (457,064)
4. GTK+ and The GIMP installers for Windows (309,402)
5. 7-Zip (271,772)
6. Audacity (270,995)
7. FileZilla (193,766)
8. emule Xtreme Mod (152,159)
9. Shareaza (148,052)
10. VirtualDub (129,449)

The article then goes on to pat the open source community on the back for being so huge.

I have a different take on this. Everything in the top 10 is a utility. It's all about transferring files and working with music/video.

Where are the applications? Where is the database that can compete with Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM? Where is the full featured ERP system? Heck, how about something that can compete with QuickBooks? Yes, there are open source projects in those areas, but their products are single digit percentage points of acceptance or power. And unless you've got a staff of programmers waiting around, the danger of being abandoned by an open source project that loses interest is much worse than by a vendor that is trying to make money from you.

Open source is great at providing OS and utilities, but anyone telling you that you can run a business completely on open source is smoking something.

0 Comments:

Find The Boots

An executive goes on a business trip. When he arrives, it's raining cats and dogs. To avoid ruining his shoes, he purchases a pair of galoshes for $15, which he expenses under "Misc." on his expense report. A week later, the accounting department rejects his expense report, with a post-it note that says that the company does not reimburse for items of clothing. The next trip, the executive turns in an expense report without the galoshes, but with a post-it note that says "FIND THE BOOTS!".