25 open source projects for software development

When the times get tough and everyone scrambles to lower costs wherever they can then it is time to consider what open source can do for you and your development efforts. Palamida has written up a list of 25 good open source projects, which could be of great help for you.

"In challenging economic times, how do internal application development teams continue to deliver higher quality software and Web applications with fewer resources? Unlike in past economic downturns, development teams today have a resource they can turn to in order to lower the costs of development, maintain high-quality, and decrease cost of ownership for the long run: open source software."

They then list open source projects in several categories:

• Development tools
• Database and mapping tools
• Core utility classes
• Reporting and charts
• Web 2.0

Obviously, the list is far from complete. For one, it's a bit Java centric: JUnit (Java unit testing) is included under 'development tools', but the many other versions of "*Unit", such as pyUnit for Python are not listed. And modern web development frameworks such as Django or Ruby-on-Rails are also not mentioned. I don't want to fault them too much for this, since clearly they have to draw the line somewhere. However, when you look at those categories please keep in mind that for every listed project there are probably dozens of other projects that haven't been included, but which are equally interesting.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Palamida's list can be found in the last column: The estimated cost to develop in-house. For example, according to that list, if you were to develop the Valgrind debugging and profiling utility yourself, it is claimed that this would cost you 60 person years, or around $3 million to develop. Ok, that's a bit simplistic since the existing development effort also contained some experimentation and work on prior versions, which could be skipped when developing from scratch and to the exitsing specs. Nevertheless, even if you halve those estimates they are still quite impressive.

I've always held that over your life time as developer you will always consume much more software than you would ever be able to produce yourself. Consequently, it makes a lot of sense to take advantage of the many free and excellent resources that open source software can provide for you.

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