Hi all,
Right now it is easy to always go to sites which provide certain kinds of application softwares but in the real world people need collaborative softwares. I think the business world is using propreitary applications for distributed work and we don't have sites which give any ratings for such softwares from the open source world.
I am talking of the virtual private network applications or CRM or CMS or wiki type softwares where lay people can really collaborate in an office or group setting. We have no rating mechanisms to judge which features are better among a group of softwares. Typically people are interested in knowing
1 whether moin moin is better than (and in what ways) mediawiki or zwiki etc etc in the field of wiki softwares. (I came across Moin moin accidentally thru the dapper ubuntu cd which features it in the opencd.org project.) or whether egroupware is better than other softwares in the same line? (groupware substitutes for lotus notes etc) or whether joomla is comparable to drupal or mambo etc etc in features" (cms applications) or whether openoffice's base application (database) is any good and if there are alternatives available in the open source world at present which can take on msaccess? (or a workaround with a mysql application for ms access) or how does freegis compare with postgis and maxdb etc gis application softwares ? (in the gis world of open source software)
or whether ruby on rails will soon outpace python, perl and php in web based application development? (though perl, php, python each have a HUGe body of historical strength) Or whether eclipse is better than kdevelop(c++) or anjuta or bluefish or boa constructor(python or delphi/pascal) or other IDEs? (when newbies have to develop open source softwares)
or the merits/demerits of IDE tools which are linked to version control system tools like cvs or subversion etc etc--which are the best tools in version control according to various features/parameters
or whether there are better tools than argo UML (poseidon is propreitary) in the field of application development software in terms of high level requirements specifications software and automatic generation of software tools
or what are the strengths vs weaknesses in short form and dispassionately analysed etc without advertising jargon.
I don't know any place where such information can be easily read and found. and these are the things which really matter for laymen to come to speed in the adoption of open source software in India. Sourceforge.net earlier used to give a maturity rating (development status) for an application but it does not do so now. Even earlier the application software results could never be ordered by the development status (except for paid customers of sourceforge) It would be great if fsfindia or somebody could enhance the work of sourceforge by having some ratings and categorisation of key application development tools/catalysts.
Thanks Kush