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