Best of Open Source Software Awards 2009 | Open Source - InfoWorld
InfoWorld's 2009 Bossies spotlight today's Top 40 open source products for business and IT pros If you think you can easily whittle down the best open source software to a manageable number, you'll soon discover that you can't do it without a great deal of hair pulling, nail biting, and gnashing of teeth. There are just too many excellent tools. Even if you give up on a "manageable" number and go whole hog -- say, a top 100, which is certainly doable -- you'll still face too many hard decisions and too many arguments. You'll be looking for a way out.
To bring you this year's 40 top open source products -- our 2009 Bossie winners -- we pulled a couple of fast ones. Our first inspired dodge was to come up with the InfoWorld Open Source Hall of Fame. There's a certain number of obviously great open source solutions (we settled on 36) that deserve a hall of fame, and though our annual Bossies selection regularly passed over most of these because of their sheer obviousness, a few inevitably complicated the process. Erecting the hall of fame allowed us to honor these inconvenient legends -- the Linuxes, BSDs, Sendmails, and Snorts -- once and for all.
[ See the slideshows of the 2009 InfoWorld Bossie Award winners: The best of open source developer tools | The best of open source enterprise software | The best of open source networking software | The best of open source platforms and middleware. ]
Our second shortcut was to omit desktop productivity tools and focus strictly on enterprise software, application development tools, networking and network management software, and platforms and middleware. We covered some of the top desktop productivity tools in "The best free open source software for Windows" -- including Linux standards such as OpenOffice.org and Firefox -- but there's so much more to talk about. Once you start down this road, you have to walk a long way.
