“What is your favorite open-source product and why?”
The best answer to the question “What is your favorite open-source product and why?” wins a FREE OSCON conference ticket valued at $1445! Leave your answer as a comment with a valid email address here by Tuesday, July 14th (extended deadline) for a chance to win!
The theme of the 11th O’Reilly OSCON is “Open for Business: Sustaining, Applying, and Expanding Open Source To Change the World.” Join us on July 20-24, 2009, in San Jose, CA, at the crossroads of all things open source where over 3,000 people will redefine the future of open source, the savings & the profit it can mean for all of us. This deeply technical conference includes more than 200 sessions over 17 tracks focusing on how open source can save money, save the day, and spread the word.
Women 2.0 members receive 15% off when you register here with coupon code “os09w2″.
13 Comments
I use Firefox a lot, enough to have (and use) their fake tatoos. I like gcc and cross compiling, it makes me feel like a god.
But the open source product that I am helplessly in love with is Audacity. I spend a lot of time looking at audio, teasing gunshots** from the sounds of the freeways and air conditioning unit. With Audacity, I can look at the spectrum and design filters much faster than in costly Matlab. I can use their noise removal to see if there is anything my dumb little DSP could have done to enhance what the police dispatchers hear. Every time I need a feature, it just happens to be there. When we went multichannel, so did they.
I remember doing these things in SoundForge or other pay-for audio editing programs but it was always *hard*. Audacity is so easy and it does just what I need. They make me want to contribute, enough that I’m off to compile Audacity so I can peek into its innards.
(**ShotSpotter, my employer, makes a gunshot location system.)
My favorite open-source product is Ubuntu its easy to install you have a lot of information about how to do things , how to install software, that increases your productivity, a lot of fun. I love the eye candy you can make your desktop an envy to others. Great for software development, better performance, less hardware requirements. I just love it
It is difficult for me to identify just one open source product because I use many in my daily life such as the popular ones like Firefox, Thunderbird and Freemind which is a great tool for mapping my thoughts.
But if I think in retrospect about my first encounter with open source that influenced where I am today and I would have to say it is Eclipse. Back in 2000, I got to know Eclipse at a Java One convention and on my way back to Puerto Rico, decided to give it a try and test run the famous trinity of Apache, MySql and Php. Being a software developer and working on a daily basis under the Microsoft platform this was a big deal. This opened my alternatives. Later on, I abandoned the corporate life to embark in the entrepreneur world and Eclipse was the immediate choice of tool as it allowed me not only to have an immediate development infrastructure with very little investment but it allowed me to program my phps, java and C and be OS independent. My first project was a portal for an association of entrepreneur hispanic women. but my proudest was the development of my first commercial mobile application for j2me back in 2004 using one of the first Eclipse-j2me plug-ins.
With all that said and experienced, Eclipse is the open source product that opened a world of opportunities for me and that is why it is my product of choice.
My favorite open source product is Fennec, Mozilla’s codename for their mobile web browser, now in Alpha.
I am excited most about this product for the potential it has — how people all over the world will access and share information and ideas. Already written in 40 languages, Fennec has the potential to make the on- and off-deck experience seamless (with the inclusion of Weave in later releases). With Fennec, no longer will the smartphone be a tool — it will be a lifestyle.
For those, like myself, who’ve more than enjoyed Firefox for its customization, personalization, speed and security, will soon be able to have that on their mobile device (Maemo, Windows Mobile, and Symbian platforms for now)…ah, the last oasis.
I’m definitely checking out what the fine people from Mozilla have to say during their “Stuffing a 900lb Gorilla into a Smartphone” session on Wednesday, July 22 at 2:35pm. More importantly, I’m looking for a positive change in my life — I think this will be a huge contributor.
Pick me! Pick me! ;)
My favourite Open Source project is WordPress. Not only is the software great but so is the community of developers behind it.
WordPress is the first blogging platform I can get totally geeky with as a developer, but when I need to just lose myself in my writing I can do that too because the experience is so great.
I think my favorite Open Source product has and always will be PuTTY. You can issue text commands, install software, reboot the server and do just about anything. Call me old fashioned, it’s just the most common method of managing and running servers.
I love OpenOffice because it’s free. Donations accepted, but free.
As a professional, Drupal is the free open source that I sell. It is the standard for content management systems used by many of the top marketing/web shops in Austin, TX. I also agree with Angie, OpenOffice is something I use everyday.
After all these years, my favorite open-source product is still MySQL. MySQL has a great developer community and tons of documentation and support online. A well-designed database provides the foundation for pretty much any software project I build. It’s great to have a reliable and open source RDBMS that I can use within an open source framework like LAMP to develop all kinds of projects.
My favorite Open Source Software, as a father, geek, and philanthropist, is Qimo Linux (http://www.qimo4kids.com).
Late last year I started a charity that takes old, second-hand computers and donates them out to special needs and low income kids. As such, I needed an OS that had child-friendly games, was easy to navigate by kids as young as 3, and would perform well on hardware designed for Windows 98. Most importantly, it had to be license free. So, with nothing more than an Xubuntu 8.10 ISO and the Ubuntu Wiki, I crafted a new distro that included the best open-source, educational games for young kids that I could find, had an appealing and intuitive desktop interface, and ran on computers that are more than a decade old.
Qimo has not only touched the lives of my family, but we’ve heard from hundreds of others who’s children are using it and loving it. We’ve had other charities pick it up to use on the computers they donate, or for use in schools or community centers. There are even YouTube videos posted by parents showing off their toddlers proudly playing with Qimo.
(Disclaimer: I am the (one and only) guy who makes Qimo, so I am kind of shamelessly promoting myself. Sorry if that breaks the rules.)
Who won? Anyone was notified?
The sub title of the theme for this year is “Sustaining, Applying, and Expanding Open Source To Change the World”
My favorite open-source product is actually an open standard (that has many open source libraries available for it) called OpenID - for individuals to have a portable identity online.
I also really love the open source nature of the main method that I use to lead unconferences called Open Space Technology - it has been a “free” method for anyone to use without restrictions for over 20 years and has been used 100,000’s of times.
The winner has been notified today. Thanks everyone for responding and find us at the Women 2.0 Meetup @ OSCON on Thursday, July 23: http://w2oscon.eventbrite.com/
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