Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

A friend of mine recently told me that he felt there were only 5 or 6 "decent" open source software projects/products. Then after a bit of discussion he revised and said well, maybe I will give you 20, but its still mostly crap.

I think I agree with the "mostly crap" part of the statement but not with the 5-6 OR the 20. As for mostly crap I think that is true of *software* in general and not just an open source phenomenon. Its very very easy to build crappy software and its difficult to do it right (even for simple tasks, getting it done well takes focus and attention that many developers dont have or dont care about). That said it makes logical sense that there is a lot of crappy open source software, but I would venture that the ratio of crappiness is lower in the open source world than in the proprietary and traditional freeware/shareware world. As to the 20 titles that are decent, I think there are hundreds of great open source software projects but that most *go unnoticed* partly because of how great they are.

So what are the top 20, what are the top 100 and beyond. Well, off the top of my head here is a short list (beyond twenty and you get the idea, there are plenty more):

• Linux - the kernel itself
• OpenBSD/FreeBSD, etc - the BSDs are great too
• Apache httpd server - nuff said
• Apache httpd modules - mod_ssl, mod_gzip, mod_rewrite, etc
• Apache Other Stuff - Jakarta, Apache XML, etc, about 50 great things here alone
• Mozilla - bam!
• ISC BIND - mega used, most people dont know they are using it)
• ISC DHCPD - same here with the mega used)
• Sendmail - nuff said again
• MSQL/MySQL/PostGres - yeah this should count as three, but for brevity lumped in
• PHP/Python/Perl - again three lumped in
• GNU Stuff - gcc, gpatch, gdb, glibc, bash, top, grep, autoconf, etc, etc, etc, about 1800 here alone
• Emacs/Vi - in THAT order
• Samba/Rsync - these are flat out awesome
• NFS - has its security issues, but behind the firebase its great
• XFree86 - yeah it counts
• KDE - and many of the KDE apps
• Xine, XawTv, Freevo, etc, etc
• ProFTPD/Wu-FTPD - pro is better, but both are good
• WU Stuff - other than ftpd, imapd, popd, pine, etc
• OpenSSL - sweet
• OpenSSH - great and used very extensively
• Darwin - yeah the apple stuff, add in there CUPS, Streaming Server, etc
• VNC - released originally by ATT labs UK, open source and great
• GIMP - awesome
• SquirrelMail/PHPMyAdmin/PHPMyAds/etc - a ton of great PHP based apps
• NetBeans - great programming IDE

. . . and again thats just off the top, I am confident there are hundreds more. Please pipe up and let me know what I have forgotten.