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InfoWorld Names its Hall of Fame FOSS Apps

InfoWorld is preparing for its annual Bossie awards, a list of the best open source software choices for business. The Bossie awards usually include some surprises, as you'll find among last year's winners. (Are you a Splunk or Ophcrack user?) InfoWorld plans to name this year's Bossie winners on August 31st, but in advance of that, the publication has compiled its list of the 36 "most useful and important free open source projects in history." Some of the hall of famers are obvious, such as Ubuntu, but not all of them are.

Wine makes the list of hall of famers, for its ability to let Linux systems run Windows applications, but InfoWorld also honors Samba,  which lets Linux computers connect to Windows file servers and share documents just as a Windows workstation does. Cygwin also gets a nod. "A port of the Unix POSIX system calls to the Win32 environment, Cygwin allows you to run the GNU Compiler Collection and many GNU utilities on a Windows machine," InfoWorld notes.

From the deep plumbing department, InfoWorld also honors BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), which is the most commonly used DNS server on the Internet, especially on Unix-like systems. According to the site: "There is probably no more important technology to enable the many various Internet applications that we all enjoy today. From Web pages to Internet VoIP telephony to the new social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook, almost everything we do on the Internet depends on DNS. The last numbers we've seen on the subject estimate that approximately 85 percent of DNS servers are running BIND."

It's worth checking out the rest of InfoWorld's hall of famers. You'll find some surprises, such as Snort, which many network administrators favor for intrusion detection and monitoring.

• ubuntu
• wine
• bind
• Snort
• Splunk
• Ophcrack

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