Optaros publishes an open source catalog

[Posted January 10, 2007 by corbet]

From:		"Jena Coletti" <JColetti-AT-racepointgroup.com>
To:		<lwn-AT-lwn.net>
Subject:		Optaros Introduces First Free Open Source Catalog
Date:		Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:14:28 -0500


Optaros Releases Open Source Catalogue 

Resource Guide Covers Over 260 Projects for IT Managers Looking to
Deploy Enterprise Open Source Solutions to Address Critical Business
Needs

BOSTON - January 10, 2007 - Optaros Inc., a consulting and integration
firm that provides enterprises with Next Generation Internet
applications leveraging open source software, today announced the
release of its Open Source Catalogue 2007. The catalogue, compiled by
Optaros' worldwide consulting and integration organization, addresses
the need for IT Managers to have a deeper understanding of current
enterprise-focused open source projects and products. The document
specifically reviews 262 projects in four software categories including
operating systems and infrastructure, application development,
infrastructure solutions and business applications.  The catalogue is
available now for download from Optaros' Web site at www.optaros.com
<http://www.optaros.com/> . 

"One of the major barriers to utilizing open source software is
confusion of what options are available to IT managers and the benefits
that these solutions bring to the enterprise," said Bruno von Rotz, vice
president of Optaros Switzerland.  "The 2007 Open Source Catalogue fills
this void, delivering unbiased reviews of the growing number of current
open source products that we view as being ready to transform the
enterprise." 

Currently there are in excess of 140,000 open source projects, a number
of which are enterprise ready but hard to identify from the multitude of
others that are more untested concepts.  Optaros' catalogue provides a
list of 262 projects that match its enterprise ready benchmark in terms
of functionality, community backing, as well as maturity and is the
result of hundreds of project reviews from over the last few years.
Optaros' consultants also conferred with communities and reviewed
project structures and approach.  

"Open source continues to see increased adoption in the enterprise and
we are extremely encouraged by this fast growing trend," said Dave Gynn,
director of enterprise tools and frameworks at Optaros. "Our goal in
publishing this catalogue was to create a resource to help guide
organizations looking for viable technology options."

About Optaros

Optaros is a consulting and systems integration firm that helps
enterprises solve IT business problems by providing services and
solutions that maximize the benefits of open source software.  Bringing
together experts in creating enterprise IT solutions and experts in the
power of open source, Optaros plans and builds business systems that
give you better value today and increased control in the future.
Optaros was recently named as one of the ten open source companies to
watch by Network World Magazine. For more about Optaros, go to
www.optaros.com <http://www.optaros.com/> .

qmail?

Posted Jan 10, 2007 20:43 UTC (Wed) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] (1 responses)

There are some interesting conclusions (qmail is said to be more enterprise-ready than postfix or sendmail, despite scoring lower in the "community" and "functionality" categories), but it still might serve as a useful starting point for people trying to choose free software.

Considering that qmail is neither open source nor free software, according to the accepted definitions in the FLOSS community, it's hard to see how this "open source" catalog is appropriate "for people trying to choose free software".

(This is the second article in one day to label qmail "open source".)

qmail?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 0:57 UTC (Thu) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]

Not to mention the fact that Sendmail actually has a company behind it, whose purpose in life is to provide - tada - enterprise support for Sendmail.

Ouch!!!

Posted Jan 10, 2007 20:52 UTC (Wed) by moxfyre (guest, #13847) [Link] (6 responses)

They gave Perl 2 stars and declining for enterprise-readiness. And they gave Python 2 stars and holding.

Yet they gave PHP 3 stars and rising?

That just seems funny to me. PHP is a basket case of a programming language in my opinion. I know a lot of ISPs support it, and people tell me it's good for quick-and-dirty stuff, but I think Perl is just as good for those kinds of tasks.

I can *sort of* see why Perl got 2 stars and falling, given that it's easy to write unmaintainable code and Perl 6 is taking forever, though it's used in so many enterprise-class projects and is a very useful language to know. I have a lot of respect for Perl.

What I can't believe is that Python got 2 stars and holding. Python is polished and stable and used by tons of enterprises... Zope, anyone? It's a lot less of a free-for-all programming language than Perl. I have no idea why Python is considered anything less than totally enterprise ready...

Ouch!!!

Posted Jan 10, 2007 20:57 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

Ditto. PHP is notorious for its bad language design and lots of security bugs -- buffer overflows/etc within the core language functions -- not including the bugs in actual PHP code.

Perl gets a bad rap

Posted Jan 10, 2007 21:45 UTC (Wed) by dns (subscriber, #4239) [Link] (1 responses)

Perl is permissive by default, and hence *can* be used
for amateur programming. But it doesn't have to be
used that way.

In my company we have a very large and complex Perl
program in a mission-critical role. Every single
file in its code-base begins with:

use 5.006_000;
use warnings;
use strict;
use Carp;

And we use both object-oriented and functional styles
of programming in a highly-maintainable way.

Perl gets a bad rap

Posted Jan 10, 2007 22:13 UTC (Wed) by moxfyre (guest, #13847) [Link]

I agree... I've used Perl to write maintainable code too. But I've used it to write a lot of spaghetti-like junk as well, and then tried to shoehorn that into my better code :-)

Ouch!!!

Posted Jan 11, 2007 19:38 UTC (Thu) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (2 responses)

The technical superiority of some language/software is actually not among the most important factors when deciding on tools for a project or your company. One of the most important things to consider is the supply of programmers who know the language. Measured with that, Python is not even close to PHP. While I'm sure among LWN readers Python might be seen as mainstream some five years ago, in my opinion in "the world out there" it is still not quite mainstream (although usable), while PHP certainly is one of the most commonly known languages today.

quantity vs quality

Posted Jan 12, 2007 1:00 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, it's true, there are a lot more PHP programmers than Python programmers.

But if you eliminate the PHP programmers whose code you wouldn't trust to put on your
server, the numbers are much closer.

I say this as someone who does a lot of programming in PHP and almost none in
Python. (But an increasing amount in Ruby.) And as someone who wants to hire more
programmers.

quantity vs quality

Posted Jan 12, 2007 6:08 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

True :-) Probably Optaron didn't consider this angle...

Actually, I have myself once considered this too: If you have access to Python programmers, at least until now they tended to be 95% gurus, whereas with PHP or Java or Visual Basic the competence range of programmers is much more different. So you can also (and many hard core hackers do this on purpose) choose tools on a basis that you want to select some particular community.

Faste and loose with "open source"

Posted Jan 11, 2007 8:27 UTC (Thu) by jhs (guest, #12429) [Link]

Page seven implies that SugarCRM releases its code as open source, when that is not the case. This is covered in the LWN article, "What is Open Source?". SugarCRM has attribution requirements in its license, and it is not "OSI Approved" (nor is it free software).

Maybe OSI approval is less meaningful, so it doesn't matter much. I wouldn't have pointed this out, except that the other comment about qmail's open source status raised a doubt for me about the author's attention to detail (or "attention to truth"). This is important when the document proposes to educate the industry about open source, with nice graphs and fonts.

An open-source method to qualify oss : QSOS

Posted Jan 11, 2007 13:07 UTC (Thu) by francoisledroff (guest, #42702) [Link]

If you wanna qualify your oss and gain a real gouvernance on your oss portfolio: I'd like to point out this project: QSOS:

QSOS is a method conceived to qualify, select and compare free and open source software in an objective, traceable and argued way.
It is made available to all, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence. cf. http://www.qsos.org/?page_id=3

It comes with a set of handy (open-source) tools:
cd. http://www.qsos.org/

Do they really know what's what?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 13:40 UTC (Thu) by BobT (guest, #37148) [Link]

Catalogue composed in Microsoft Word. The PDF is generated by Adobe Acrobat but violates the Adobe specification (non-embedded TrueType fonts). I'd give this effort more credence if they used an open-source word processor (or, even better, LaTeX) and PDF-generator. BTW, the PDF file name should use optaros, not opteros; LWN may be violating the attribution requirements of the licence.