An article at Techopedia introduces MariaDB and describes its important to other FOSS projects. The project is a fork of MySQL, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, which was in turn purchased by Oracle in 2010. Community concern over the latter for-profit company controlling such a crucial piece of free software infrastructure led to the split.
Proton VPN Tops CNN List of Small Business Solutions
Proton VPN, a fully open source service, came out on top of a short list of VPN providers for small businesses by CNN. It’s free version is fully featured and advertisement free, although it’s limited to a single device. The article recognizes the option for Proton VPN’s proprietary VPN protocol (called Stealth), which can be useful in circumventing some bans on VPN use (such as trying to stream out-of-region video). However, the review also calls out Protons small number of servers and countries, as well as “poor support” for Linux, although it provides no commentary on the latter (and Proton provides a dedicated Linux app as well as support for open protocols like Wireguard).
List of Top Open Source ERPs Contains Wide Range of Solutions
Many of the usual suspects (such as Odoo and ERPNext) make their appearances in a list of top open source ERP solutions by Simukopa. However, the list also contains other notable entries include Dolibarr, which is billed as being well suited to smaller orgs and freelancers, and iDempiere, like the above covers a large complement of business functions. It even includes Apache’s OFBiz project (“Open for Business”), which provides a robust platform on which to build custom business solutions.
Open Source Solution Among Best for Retail CRM
Open Source AuroCRM was featured among top CRM soltuions for Retail, according to a piece from Solutions Review. In a list that included giants such as Salesforce, Microsoft’s Dynamics 365, and NetSuite, AuroCRM’s retail-specific features offered significant value when paired with its openness and customizability. However, the solution doesn’t appear to have a Comminity Edition or other open source version to try, although the company does offer free trials.
Open Source CrafterCMS Reports Profitability, Growth in 2023
While commercial operations for “coupled” CMSes like Acquia (Drupal) and Automattic (WordPress) have been running for some time, the segment of “headless” content management systems, are newer disruptors in the market. Unlike traditional, “monolithic” CMSes that are responsible for both administering and serving content, headless solutions decouple these two functions. This not only makes the content itself leaner (as it’s comprised of “flat” HTML, instead of pages that must populate from a database when loaded), but often allows for mixing and matching of the tooling that administers the content from that which generates it. CrafterCMS, a solution built in Java, announced stepping into the black in 2023, bolstered by growth in enterprise services and Crafter Cloud, it’s cloud service offering.
Groupware Platform Launches Open Source Community Edition
Zextras Group, which develops the Carbonio groupware suite, announced the availability of its open source Community Edition (via Yahoo! Finance). A competitor to solutions such as Office 365, Google Workspace, or open source solutions like Zimbra, Carbonio CE offers email, calendaring and events, contacts, tasks, chat (including video), files, and documents for free. The solution is supported on Ubuntu 20.04 or RHEL 8 servers, and has minimal software requirements (primarily Python 3 and Perl).
Business News This Week on Git vs. GitHub
An article published by Business News This Week explains the difference between Git and GitHub.
This is not so much an apples-to-apples comparison, as an explanation why the two terms shouldn’t be used interchangably. Git is a program (developed by Linux creator Linus Torvalds) that allows for decentralized version control for code, although in recent days Git is being used to manage much more. Unlike older applications such as Subversion, which rely on a central repository and allow only one user to work on a file at any given time, Git allows many users to make changes in parallel, which are all “merged” into a main copy before deployment. GitHub offers a platform that can serve as this main copy (this is an oversimplification, but sufficient for a basic understanding) while adding features such as discussions, code review, and task management.
An Explanation of Linux Containers
OpenSourceForU published a rundown of “Linux containers,” which in this context means the container platforms that are available to run with Linux as the underlying OS. It’s a good overview that demonstrates there are other platforms available for running containers, and includes some of the solutions higher up the stack (e.g. Red Hat’s OpenShift, which supports multiple underlying runtimes with Kubernetes performing orchestration). This is a good follow up the headline from BizTech Magazine in our March 10th, 2023 newsletter, which goes over the concept of containers.
Source Digit Highlights Open Source Tools for Local Businesses
An article by Source Digit highlights how open source can cover a large portion of the tech needs for many types of small businesses. Covering inventory, ERP, CRM, web communications, and collaboration tools, segments such as retail or small-scale manufacturing could use this piece as a checklist. While work management isn’t covered explicitly, a number of ERP and collaboration solutions have rudimentary task tools built in as well.
Analytics Insight on Starting an Open Source Project
An article from Analytics Insight provides a high-level roadmap to starting an open source project.
While reducing many of the steps to a single bullet point is of course oversimplifying them, the piece nonetheless does a good job of covering the things FOSS project founders should consider. The editor can attest that one of the community engagement steps, “celebrate milestones,” does indeed do a lot for the project. The takeaway for would-be entrepreneurs is that the start of an open source project can also be the start of your future business.
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