Bossie Awards 2013: The best open source applications

From personal finance and small-business servers to integrated ERP stacks with thousands of modules catering to every need, we’ve rounded up the best and most active application projects the open source world has to offer. Remember when downloading a virtual appliance was the easiest way to get started? More and more companies behind the projects are making it even easier with SaaS options. Other app projects are catching mobile fever, adopting mobile-friendly JavaScript frameworks to create more flexible front ends.

Sometimes the best things are the most humble and unassuming ones. Stacks like the Apache HTTP Server, Nginx, and Node.js may be powering more and more of the Web, but let’s not overlook their invisible helpers. Varnish is an HTTP caching and acceleration proxy, designed to do one thing and do it well: make Web pages load faster. The creators boast speedups of anywhere from 300 to 1,000 times, “depending on your architecture.” Varnish comes with its own configuration language to allow fine-tuning for your needs, add-on modules for dealing with everything from authentication to secure downloads, and extremely liberal licensing.

— Serdar Yegulalp

The xTuple project continues to evolve and innovate. The free open source community version, known as xTuple PostBooks, is fairly comprehensive and suitable for many small businesses. The open source commercial versions add premium functionality for manufacturers and distributors. Third-party add-ons and extensions are available through xTuple’s app store. The project is currently phasing in a new mobile and Web client platform, which runs concurrently with the Qt GUI client. Based on Enyo, the new mobile/Web client will soon be available in the CRM modules, followed by the sales. The company has also announced integration with OrangeHRM.

— Fred Blauer

Started in 2008 as an open source replacement for Windows Communication Foundation services, this .Net integration stack is complete, well engineered, and fast. Service Stack is simple to add to a project via NuGet, and the services easily allow you to consume XML, JSON, or SOAP objects. NoSQL, messaging, logging, all work seamlessly together. There is an active community, with plenty of users on StackOverflow for problem resolution. Finally, the project has made it a design goal to support Mono, so you can use its services on both Windows and Unix.

— Steven Nuñez

U.S. school systems purchase scores of software packages, each of which has its own representation of a student and his or her data. However, school systems can’t afford a point-to-point IT integration project for their unique mix of software. inBloom creates a common platform that allows vendors to write to one data API. The goal is to not only avoid data integration costs, but to expand the market for software aimed at K-12 school systems. inBloom is a multitenancy system based on MongoDB, and maintains local control of student data. The first few packages have been released on GitHub and more are to come.

— Andrew C. Oliver

BigBlueButton is a free open source Web conferencing system that allows multiple audio and video streams with integrated whiteboard, chat, and desktop sharing. It’s tailored for academia, but potentially useful to anyone. The server installs on Ubuntu (detailed instructions available), but it’s much easier to download and install the VMware image.

Performance is good. I was able to connect four simultaneous users — all video streaming — with the BigBlueButton server running in a VM on my Core i7 2.33GHz laptop with 8GB memory without any issues. Clients need a modern browser with the latest version of Flash. An online demo server is available for you and your friends to try.

— Joseph Roth

TurnKey Linux is a project devoted to building free, easy-to-install, ready-to-run, Debian-based software appliances. Currently more than 100 appliances — including Tomcat, LAMP, LAPP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Django, Rails, Drupal, WordPress, and other servers — are available for download, preconfigured with a minimal OS footprint and packaged in many build formats and as an installable Live CD. Builds are available for VMware, OVF, OpenStack, OpenVZ, and Xen. Once deployed, TurnKey appliances receive updates and security patches automatically.

— High Mobley