Optaros Publishes Open Source Scorecard

January 12, 2007: Optaros has released a report into what it considers, are the best 262 open source applications around.

The international consulting and systems integration firm has created the list for worldwide consultation, research, evaluation and community interaction. The open source platforms are listed under four central themes including including operating systems and infrastructure, application development, infrastructure solutions and business applications.

Optaros says there are over 140,000 open source projects in existence, making a standard overview of their benefits difficult for those making decisions over what should be implemented. The Open Source Catalogue 2007 is designed to give some direction to the endless projects available by listing what Optaros believes, are the most user friendly, relevant, useful and enterprise ready.

As well as providing a list, Optaros also set out to determine the functionality, community support, maturity and trend of each of the projects listed by utlilising a number of different rating systems throughout the catalogue.

Under the banner of Infrastructure Solutions, Optaros presents a selection of open source platforms for ECM, document management, web content management, identity and access management, collaboration and VoIP. In this category Optaros admits the 40 listed are overrepresented in terms of the overall spectrum of open source solutions. But it’s a category where Optaros believes many mature and viable solutions can be found.

Optaros says open source solutions that meet enterprise content management needs are particuarly strong. Alfresco is leading the way yet other platforms such as eZpublish, Plone and Typo3 are also being taken up in large numbers by enterprises.

In his opening statement of a white paper accompanying the catalogue, possibly to disband the potential for outcry from those not included, Bruno von Rotz, vice president of Optaros Switzerland says the list is open to feedback and further community discussion. “It is not intended to replace detail evaluation of proof of concepts but provide some help to conduct a first selection,” he says.

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