Bossie Awards 2013: The best open source desktop and mobile software

When Microsoft forgot to put a Start menu in Windows 8, who came to the rescue? That’s right, open source did. Just download and install Classic Shell (one of this year’s Bossie winners) to put that Start menu back where it belongs. Open source has a replacement for your Microsoft Office too, of course. But then, open source has a replacement for everything. 

To paraphrase an Elvis Presley album title, 900 million devices can’t be wrong. Android 4.2 and 4.3 heaped a slew of new features into the OS, such as a gestural keyboard, multiuser modes including restricted profiles (“kid mode”), tons of improvements to the way Wi-Fi works, and smarter data-usage controls. Hardware wasn’t ignored either: Bluetooth Low-Energy, HDMI mirroring, and OpenGL ES 3.0 are all supported now as well. It might be a while before Jelly Bean shows up on your favorite phone or tablet (isn’t that always the way?), but it will be worth the wait.

— Serdar Yegulalp

Even if stock versions of Android have improved by leaps and bounds, carriers and handset makers continue to shoehorn much of their own, well, junk into Android phones. Not only that, but experts who itch to tweak their Android experience to the nines are often left out in the cold.

CyanogenMod helps these folks scratch such itches. A regularly updated alternative build of Android, it’s jammed to the gills with under-the-hood options of every imaginable kind. Users have even reported better battery life and reception strength compared to some stock ROMs. Be warned that CyanogenMod is not for amateurs. You’ll need to root your phone or use a phone with an unlocked bootloader.

— Serdar Yegulalp

KeePass is a password manager that runs on Windows (and Mac OS X, Linux, and BSD systems running Mono). It stores passwords for all of your applications and websites in a single encrypted database, and lets you retrieve them with a single master password, or a key file stored on a floppy, CD, or USB stick — or both. You can run KeePass itself from a USB stick and lock it to a Windows user account. Among other nice features, it will generate strong random passwords for you.

— High Mobley

ProjectLibre is a Java-based project management solution that gives Microsoft Project a run for its money. Offering a UI similar enough to ease the transition from Microsoft’s market leader, ProjectLibre packs in calendars, resource tracking, task management, and cost-tracking tools.

ProjectLibre produces the same familiar Gantt and critical-path method charts that project managers rely on, and its project files are interchangeable with Microsoft Project. It is not yet suitable for multiproject management because support for subprojects and resource pooling is lacking. But this could change soon. New cloud and server versions are in the works.

— James R. Borck