The best Open Source products recognised by InfoWorld Bossies 2008

InfoWorld, has awarded its Bossies – Best of open source software awards – 2008, for the best of open source software. The Bossies are selected by a panel from InfoWorlds editorial and test centre team, unlike the SourceForge Community Awards which are voted on by the community.

InfoWorld divided the 60 winning applications into eight main categories; Enterprise applications – ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence – networking, security, storage, platforms and middleware, application development tools, productivity applications and collaboration.

It was not surprising that the panel would opt for the usual suspects such as SugarCRM, Alfresco content management, Asterik's IP telephony and OpenOffice, as they had won Bossies in 2007. The panel's reasoning was less obvious with the awards in ERP – Compiere beat Openbravo, Business Intelligence – Pentaho beat JasperSoft and groupware – Scalix beating Zimbra. Among the other winners in the business segment, dotProject took best project management, Hyperic HQ won for best application monitoring and Liferay for enterprise portals.

In the platforms and middleware category, MySQL took best database, with VirtualBox and Xen taking home the prize for virtualisation on the desktop and server respectively.

On the desktop, InfoWorld selected Ubuntu as best operating system, while Puppy Linux got its reward with best small footprint operating system. Firefox lead in the browser award, Gimp in image processing and Audacity for sound editing. A full list of all the category winners is available on OStatic.

(djwm)