Open Source Gems

By Bill Nicholls

June 9, 2003

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Open Source has come of age. No longer does OS fame rely solely on systems software such as Linux, Apache and the BSD Brigade. In the last year, StarOffice and OpenOffice have assulted the Microsoft throne of office suites. In the database arena, MySQL, PostgreSQL and several others have proven themselves capable of enterprise-level scalability and performance.

All of these software packages are necessary for independence from Microsoft, but they are not sufficient for full operation of a business, even a small home business. What has been missing are essential tools for security, backup, and business processing. Today, I can comfortably state that open source covers the first two of those needs and the third, business processing, is well under way.

The fourth OS gem is not a package but a software environment that delivers on the promise of Java—operating system independence. Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) has opened the door via Web services and grown into general purpose processing. Now that there's a strong open source J2EE version in JBoss, the toolset for independence is complete enough to support the majority of businesses and end users of computing services.

Information on each of these gems follows, plus instructions on how to find just what you need in that grand mine of open source development, SourceForge. Without this central organization, both development and use of open source software would be more difficult and delayed.

As a result of its impact on open source development, I nominate SourceForge and its supporters for the "Most Important Software Project" in the first decade of the 21st century.

Gem #1: Firewall Builder

Security filters are not easy to implement at the operating system level. This particular problem has been well solved by a package named Firewall Builder, which fills a security requirement for every site connected to the Internet. This package supports multiple platforms with a standard format and policy compilers for the specific platforms, including iptables, ipfilter, OpenBSD PF and Cisco PIX.

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