Tag Archive for 'open source'

Open Source Living - a Directory of OSS Apps

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by
Linewbie.com
on January 1, 2008
in applications/software and open source
. 0 Comments

There maybe countless arguments for using open source applications, but one of the strongest is having a single interface to learn when working on Windows, Mac or Linux systems. Website directory Open Source Living helps you to find just those kind of programs. It’s not an extensive, all-in-one directory, but it seems to narrow its choices based on quality and widespread acceptance. Open Source Living is an archive of the best open source applications. Software is sorted by categories, such as Web, Graphics, Audio. And while not every application listed at Open Source Living is entirely cross-platform, a good deal of them are.

Check out also Mohawke’s Best of the Best Free and Open Source Software Collection: Mac OS X and Windows software Collection and Open Source Apps on Mac. Ah, and this one.

Start your new year with open source software :-p

Wordpress is all grown up, wins best CMS Award

Published
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Linewbie.com
on November 2, 2007
in quotes & thoughts and wordpress/blogging
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Wordpress, which I had previously considered “just” a blogging engine, has been named the best open source Content Management System for social networking, beating Drupal and Elgg. (Picture from PhotoMatt.)The Judges commented on “WordPress’s ease of configuration, professional approach, usability and enthusiastic community,” awarding the project $2,000.

Wordpress was started by Matt Mullenweg in 2003. He worked for a while at C|Net before founding Automattic, which hosts blogs, runs an anti-spam service called Akismet, and does other cool stuff.

ZDNet runs on WordPress, and I must admit that each new version of the software seems better than what came before. I also use Drupal at Voic.Us and my personal blog runs through Typepad, a hosted version of Movable Type.

The success of WordPress offers some great lessons about the Internet space, which many analysts still refuse to accept. Remember that by 2003  Google had already acquired Blogger. CMS systems like Drupal, Slash and Scoop were already well-established. Why would anyone need another blogging engine, let alone an open source CMS?

Yet just as Google was able to blow by Yahoo, which everyone in the late 1990s thought owned the search space (that’s why they expanded and became a portal), WordPress was able to blow by a unit of Google, and in relatively short order. Not to mention all those other competitors, who are not chopped liver. (I do like Typepad and Drupal.)

Any analyst who tells you anyone in the Internet owns anything, and that ownership is permanent, just isn’t living in the real world. Change remains possible. Leaders can be caught. If you’ve got a better mousetrap build it, and if it is better, if you run things right, you can win in the open source marketplace.

One more piece of wisdom. Stay humble.  Mullenweg calls his own blog PhotoMatt, and his announcement of this award was quite brief, a simple, one word celebration. “Yay!” He was unavailable for comment because he’s at an event in Argentina, having just acquired Gravatar.

Young man in a hurry in a very small world.

- by Dana Blankenhorn

Apple’s Leopard Features ODF

Published
by
Linewbie.com
on November 1, 2007
in linux/unix/os distros, mac/osx and news
. 0 Comments

 

Apple’s latest incarnation of OS X “Leopard” will be able to read OASIS’s ODF.

Good news for open source community and for the compatibility as whole, but then how does ECMA’s Office XML correspond to UNIX specs!!! How about saving files in ODF … is it there in Save As option. Here is what else Leopard is going to feature.