OStatic

Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are increasingly either employing open source or are built entirely on it, a la SugarCRM. Meanwhile, there continue to be many opportunities for open source Web 2.0 and e-commerce applications to grow. If you're collaborating on any open source project that requires web application development, here are over twelve free resources to help you--many of them open source themselves.

Most website owners, when they're ready to try to extract some money from their sites, turn to a single source such as Google AdSense or one of its competitors. But if you're a site owner, there's a more flexible alternative that's worth a look. Better yet, it's open source from end to end: OpenX.

There are big moves going on at OpenX. Former Yahoo! ad executive Tim Cadogan has joined the company as CEO, and the firm is moving its headquarters from chilly London to sunny L.A. If you haven't followed the OpenX story, it's an open source hosted ad management solution that competes with offerings such as Google's Ad Manager. It serves about 30,000 mostly small- to medium-sized publishers with billions of ads per day. There are good reasons to look into it as an alternative to Google's offerings, and one of those is that Google's acquisition of DoubleClick makes it both a publisher and an ad server, which may worry some clients from the perspective of conflicts.

It always strikes me as incongruous that much of the power of the web comes from open, shared protocols, but most people tyring to run successful web sites and blogs don't use open source tools to drive their success. That's not always true of course. For example, the entire OStatic site is built on Drupal--an open source content management system. Thanks, by the way, to the readers who have written in liking what we've done with our interface. In this post, I'll discuss a couple of other very powerful open source applications that can help you make a success of your web site.