Top Five Open Source Projects of 2009

Every year, I single out what I think are the Top Five open source projects. This year, there’s only one hold-over from previous years, and it’s likely that I’m just going to give it a Lifetime Achievement Award and pick five others next year.

5. NetBeans

NetBeans is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It’s a comprehensive tool for developing applications, whether client, server or web-based. NetBeans runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS X and Solaris. The main features I find appealing about NetBeans are

• Support for most commonly used programming languages: The only ding I have against NetBeans here is that it doesn’t appear to support Perl. But it does support PHP, Python, JavaScript and Ruby, and includes the jRuby environment.
• Comprehensive bundling: If you install the full NetBeans bundle, you get everything you need to develop and deploy applications except an OS and a database.
• Tutorials: You can learn application development by just downloading and installing NetBeans and working your way through all the tutorials.

4. VirtualBox Open Source Edition

VirtualBox has come a long way from its primitive origins. It now supports hardware-level virtualization assists from Intel and AMD, kernel-level assists on Linux hosts, importing and exporting appliances in Open Virtualization Format (OVF), multiple processors, and just about every type of Linux guest out there. VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS X and OpenSolaris. I build a lot of appliances, and I’ve found VirtualBox OSE indispensible.

3. R

Yes, it’s high time I just gave R a Lifetime Achievement Award and released its spot in the Top Five for some other packages. So I’ll use the space I’d ordinarily devote to re-singing the praises of R to mention some companion software that I consider “part” of R.

First is GGobi. GGobi is an interactive data visualization and exploratory data analysis tool that I find indispensible in making sense of large datasets. You can read all about GGobi here.

Second is GGPlot2. GGplot2 is a plotting system for R based on the Grammar of Graphics. GGPlot2 generates absolutely spectacular presentation graphics, and provides advanced analytics and visualization. You can read all about GGPlot2 here.

Finally, I recommend the R Commander package for anyone coming to R from a spreadsheet or other statistical package. R is by design a programming language, and thus provides ultimate power and flexibility. The downside is that non-programmers may not have the time to learn programming just to get some work done. R Commander provides a typical GUI wrapped around R, incorporating most of the commonly-used statistical methods.

2. Sage: Open Source Math Software

Sage is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It combines the power of many existing open-source packages into a common Python-based interface. The mission of the Sage project is “Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.”

In addition to the Sage software you can load on your workstation, there is also an online Sage Notebook at http://www.sagenb.org/. Users can collaborate on mathematical projects using this service, either publicly or privately.

1. openSUSE 11.2

This isn’t going to be a great surprise if you’ve been following me over the past year on Twitter. I first started using openSUSE about a year and a half ago, when openSUSE 11.0 was released. I switched all of my Linux use over to openSUSE when 11.1 was released, and I’ve been beta testing 11.2 for about three months.

In my opinion, openSUSE 11.2 has finally made a Linux desktop / laptop practical as a small business alternative to Windows or MacOS X. As recently as a year ago, I don’t think I could have made such a claim with a straight face. The open source browsers weren’t quite there. The open source office suites weren’t quite there. The open source virtualizers weren’t quite there. Open source imaging and multimedia weren’t quite there. Open source Java wasn’t quite there. And so on.

That’s all changed. The only weak spot remaining in the openSUSE 11.2 desktop I’ve found is in open source Flash tools. The open source Flash tools still struggle with quite a few web sites. I’m hoping that they’ll catch up, but right now, I need to use the Adobe player.