Palamida's Open Source Hit Parade

Palamida's a firm that sells consultancy services for open source software, so it's not exactly a surprise that it would be listing "25 Hot Open Projects You Should Be Using Now To Save Money" in its recent report on the open source outlook for IT in 2009. It has posted the list at its blog with the headline "In A Time Of Less, Do More With Open Source."

This particular list's interesting, since it deals with actual programming tools and components, not just the usual raft of day-to-day applications. It's a more sophisticated approach than the usual "you can replace Word with OpenOffice.org and Photoshop with GIMP" mantra that passes for such discussion in most circles.

Palamida also supplies statistics for the cost to develop each package in-house (courtesy of OhLoh), but such numbers often seem slightly beside the point. Most people don't try to develop their own compression or video-encoding libraries in house; they tend to use commercial packages or existing platform libraries for such things. What might be more useful is a comparison of cost for packages where your choices consist of a) licensing a commercial library, b) developing something completely from scratch, or c) using an existing open source solution.

The most useful things on the list, from a cost-of-development perspective, are probably the Web 2.0 projects like jQuery. They provide the most immediate and visible benefits -- not just to developers but those who use sites driven by them. It's the sort of payoff that doesn't require a cost analysis to prove itself.

I'll be talking to Palamida in detail in a few days for more details.

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