If you think you can easily whittle down the best open source software to a manageable number, you’ll soon discover that you can’t do it without a great deal of hair pulling, nail biting, and gnashing of teeth. There are just too many excellent tools. Even if you give up on a “manageable” number and go whole hog — say, a top 100, which is certainly doable — you’ll still face too many hard decisions and too many arguments. You’ll be looking for a way out.
To bring you this year’s 40 top open source products — our 2009 Bossie winners — we pulled a couple of fast ones. Our first inspired dodge was to come up with the InfoWorld Open Source Hall of Fame. There’s a certain number of obviously great open source solutions (we settled on 36) that deserve a hall of fame, and though our annual Bossies selection regularly passed over most of these because of their sheer obviousness, a few inevitably complicated the process. Erecting the hall of fame allowed us to honor these inconvenient legends — the Linuxes, BSDs, Sendmails, and Snorts — once and for all…
