Dirk Morris, has a post over at SOAWorld, on his top five Open Source applications (slanted of course towards network security, his forte). But it raises an interesting question, what are your top five Open Source applications? What are the ones you can’t live without? Which ones provide the important business infrastructure that your business, small or large, can’t live without?

I don’t run a business, but I live in open source (minus my Mac, which is more of a hybrid). So my top five don’t reflect a business point of view, but more of an end user point of view.

0/ Firefox – It is how I “see” the world. Firefox is the window/vehicle that gets me from place to place.

1/ OpenOffice/NeoOffice – While I do have Microsoft Office, I invariably turn to OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. I don’t see why you would want to lock content away in binary formats, that may not be usable in the future. (And yes I am poo-pooing OOXML. Something can be open and still not be open. Can a spec that is 6000 pages long really be open?)

2/ Linux – My preferred distro is openSUSE. For the past two and a half years, Linux was my primary OS. (Even my wife uses Linux on her laptop.) The control, the flexibility, freedom of choice, you name it, Linux has got it in spades. And lets not forget, it is just plain cool.

3/ Gallery – With family and friends spread all over the world, the best medium with which to communicate is the Internet. And pictures are worth a thousand words. We share those special moments with them using Gallery.

4/ Adium – If you have friends, and most likely you do, chances are they are on separate IM networks. Running multiple IM clients is just crazy. For Mac users, Adium is a must. Or for Linux/windows you have Pidgin. All are running libpurple on the backend.

Those are the ones I use most…..well those and Eclipse, XNJB, Apache, WordPress, and a whole slew of other apps. Oh and by the way can I interest you in a little open source document management?

Alfresco has just published a survey taken of our community members on their software usage.  Take a look at how you stack up against our growing community.

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