Open-Source Systems You May Have Taken for Granted: 10 Examples

By Chris Preimesberger

As the big data space continues to explode, so has the variety of projects that help make the most of it. Most people are already familiar with Apache Hadoop, and many are leveraging Cascading. However, we’re also seeing emerging solutions from companies such as Wibidata that are connecting big data directly to the front office, and projects like Storm and Kafka that are set to change the future of stream processing. Even open-source solutions from established players like Jaspersoft and Pentaho are driving innovation and creating enormous value for companies focused on big data execution.

From graph databases to enterprise search through archives or high-security storage, there are options for solving the most difficult data search and analysis problems. Examples include Facebook’s Graph Search, Parquet, MongoDB, Giraph, Neo4j, CouchDB, Cassandra, Elastic Search and HBase, to name a few. Open-source data storage currently supports hundreds of thousands of successful deployments and continues to grow in use.

Open-source software has provided the foundation for many cloud computing implementations, including those from Cloud Foundry, CloudStack and Zoho. Perhaps the most surprising of all has been the rapid growth behind OpenStack, which in only three years has garnered support and commercial distributions from companies including Red Hat, Piston, Intel, Dell, Midokura, Cisco, IBM and HP.

Used as a back-end system to manage Websites while largely avoiding the need for hand coding, most of the most successful CMS solutions are open source. Examples include Liferay, concrete5, Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.

Alternatives to traditional storage, like those from Amazon and EMC, are gaining market momentum. With popular open-source offerings from ZFS (Zettabyte File System), Open Solaris, Ceph, Gluster, FreeNAS and SwiftStack, storage software is undergoing some serious open-source changes.

Open source is driving global research innovation with efforts that include OpenROV, a community-driven research and development project aiming to make underwater robotic exploration accessible to almost anyone. Another one is OpenQuake, a suite of software tools designed to aid the uploading and sharing of earthquake data to support better global research and response efforts.

Mobile applications are literally changing the world, and they continue to permeate our lives. Front and center has been Google’s Android operating system, but there are many other projects within the space that are driving innovation and value, from productivity applications and games to mobile management. The freemium method of introduction works well: “Free” is awfully hard to beat in any business.

An emerging project, SaltStack is a dynamic infrastructure communication bus that provides server orchestration, remote execution and configuration management. Puppet, Chef, Mesos and OpenNebula are other excellent options for operators who are looking for alternatives.

Adobe’s Dreamweaver is one of the most popular programs for creating and designing Web pages, but its high price tag is a big drawback. Alternative open-source options include BlueGriffon, KompoZer, Amaya, Bluefish Editor and Aptana Studio.

If you’re a developer, you’ll have your favorite languages with which to code, whether system-level or scripting. If they happen to include Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, Clojure and Tk/Tcl, then you are also a fan of open source.