5 stars of open-source products

• Sep 26, 2005

OpenOffice

The OpenOffice suite, backed by a community organized by Sun in 2000, provides a set of office productivity programs, including a word processor, spreadsheet generator and presentation program, that brings open-source advantages to a software market dominated by Microsoft.

OpenOffice's strengths include support for multiple computing platforms and spoken languages, and, in an upcoming release now in beta testing, default support for the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards' OpenDocument file format based on Extensible Markup Language.

In part because of the latter capability, Massachusetts recently announced that it plans to use applications built around the OpenDocument format and wean itself from proprietary document formats, including .doc and others used in Microsoft Office.

In a statement, the commonwealth's chief information officer, Peter Quinn, said open document formats are important "for the current and future accessibility of government records."

File format compatibility could prompt other public-sector CIOs to consider similar moves, said Murugan Pal, founder and chief technology officer of SpikeSource, which sells combinations of open-source products and support licenses.

"Two hundred years from now, organizations won't want to be paying software royalties just so they can read documents that were formatted in a variety of old formats," he said.

Even if OpenDocument isn't the prevailing format years from now, developers will be able to easily create tools that understand it, he said. "The moment a format is not owned commercially, anybody can create an interpreter to read that format," he added.

Willis said he believes future readability isn't only a technical consideration. "As a steward of electronic data for our citizens, it pains me to see data stored in proprietary formats," he said.

"As soon as a state employee hits the Save button, they're imposing a tax on the citizens. [OpenDocument] could be a saving grace," Willis added. "If vendors don't pick up the format, hopefully they will hear an outcry from citizens, like the Stamp Tax."

Microsoft has said its next Office release will support OpenDocument, but not natively, which means users would have to select that format option every time they save a file.

PHP

Public-sector technology experts say simplicity and efficiency are two of the top benefits of PHP, a general-purpose scripting language that moves data from databases to Web servers, among other jobs.

Morrow said he was one of PHP's earliest users back in the 1990s. "To be honest, it couldn't do a whole lot back then," he said, but he added that the scripting language has steadily evolved. "Plus, the fact that it's being compiled as an Apache module adds so much speed."

Willis said simplicity makes the transition to PHP easy. "Ramp-up time is trivial," he said.

Reliability is another plus. "Early on in the adoption of open source, many people were concerned about support. It's the classic, 'Who's throat can I choke?' question," said Andrew Aitken, managing partner of the Olliance Group, a management consulting firm that specializes in open source. "Now a number of commercial entities provide that service."

Joch is a business and technology writer based in New England. He can be reached at [email protected].