10.4 Examples of Open Source Software
Learning Objectives
After studying this section you should be able to do the following:
- Recognize that just about every type of commercial product has an open source equivalent.
- Be able to list commercial products and their open source competitors.
Just about every type of commercial product has an open source equivalent. SourceForge.net lists over two hundred and thirty thousand such products1! Many of these products come with the installation tools, support utilities, and full documentation that make them difficult to distinguish from traditional commercial efforts (Woods, 2008). In addition to the LAMP products, some major examples include the following:
- Firefox—a Web browser that competes with Internet Explorer
- OpenOffice—a competitor to Microsoft Office
- Gimp—a graphic tool with features found in Photoshop
- Alfresco—collaboration software that competes with Microsoft Sharepoint and EMC’s Documentum
- Marketcetera—an enterprise trading platform for hedge fund managers that competes with FlexTrade and Portware
- Zimbra—open source e-mail software that competes with Outlook server
- MySQL, Ingres, and EnterpriseDB—open source database software packages that each go head-to-head with commercial products from Oracle, Microsoft, Sybase, and IBM
- SugarCRM—customer relationship management software that competes with Salesforce.com and Siebel
- Asterix—an open source implementation for running a PBX corporate telephony system that competes with offerings from Nortel and Cisco, among others
- Free BSD and Sun’s OpenSolaris—open source versions of the Unix operating system
Key Takeaways
- There are thousands of open source products available, covering nearly every software category. Many have a sophistication that rivals commercial software products.
- Not all open source products are contenders. Less popular open source products are not likely to attract the community of users and contributors necessary to help these products improve over time (again we see network effects are a key to success—this time in determining the quality of an OSS effort).
- Just about every type of commercial product has an open source equivalent.
Questions and Exercises
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Browse SourceForge: name a few software types and their open-source competitors. Who do they compete with?
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Who builds these tools (company, nonprofit, individual)? Does that affect your trust?
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Download one open-source app similar to one you use. Compare it. Would you switch? Why?
