h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...by which I mean applications which are best-of-breed and also happen to be open source, not just the best open source applications you can get. Please add any I've missed.

Apache webserver.
The most used (I believe) webserver in the world. Quite simply without it the web would be a much smaller place. Cross-platform.

BIND DNS server.
The programme that turns www.bbc.co.uk into a numerical pointer that computers can understand, allowing you to find the webserver on which websites are hosted. Cross-platform(?).

Mozilla Internet Suite.
Most standards compliant (usable) web browser, far in advance of the industry leading Internet Explorer, a very competant emailer (with various ahead-of-the-game features), a standards based web authoring programme, an IRC client and even advanced tools (such as a javascript debugged) for web programming. Cross-platform.

Mozilla Firefox.
Arguably the best next-generation stand-alone browser, fast, efficient, extensible and standards compliant. Cross-platform.

OpenBSD secure operating system (or do I mean NetBSD?).
Most secure operating system ever, with possibly one known exploit in its entire history.

Evolution Emailer and PIM.
Highly efficient email client and personal information management tools, with loads of advanced features such as Virtual Folders. (Linux, Unix, MacOS X (?)).

Emacs editor.
Far more than just an editor, you can do just about anything in the universe with this tool. You either love it or you hate it. (Linux, Unix (?)).

Ogg Vorbis music format.
Open source, patent-unemcumbered music file-format. A sort of advanced MP3 equivilent, free to use, create, and incorporate into other things, and sounds great even with low file sizes. Cross-platform.

FLAC audio format.
Free Lossless Audio Codec, for compressing audio without losing any information. Cross-platform.

Openoffice.org Office Suite.
Arguably better than leading competitor Microsoft Office, there are many features that MS Office lacks that makes this suite a winner, though some other possibly useful functions are missing. Cross-platform.

...I must have missed loads on that list - please add what I've forgotten.

Gaim Instant Messaging Application
Gaim is open source and is available for both Linux and Windows. Its major advantage is that supports almost all IM protocols, including MSN, ICQ, AOL and Yahoo.

But is it better than, say, Trillian? Or even a Jabber client? I use GAIM everyday, but am not convinced it's best of breed... Convince me!

I haven't used Trillian and the Gabber software - for the Jabber client as you say - is just for that. Gaim provides support for almost all IM protocols available, which is something no commercial Windows software can do. And many people have written their own interesting plug-ins for it that make it quite a diverse application, at least in comparison to MSN Messenger. And you can even have custom 'Away' messages.

But of course, it is only on version 0.70, so for a sub-unity application it isn't doing too badly. Once we get to version 1, which should be considered wholesomely stable, it should be quite complete.

MySQL - a relational database which is magnificently scaleable.

Samba - The best remote acess network filing system. not to be confused with a peer to peer file sharing system.

Sendmail or Exim - the two best email transfer programs, although the question of best depends on what for. exim is the easiest to configure, while sendmail is the most powerfull.

Well, if we're going to mention EMACS, I say we should mention Vim as at the very least on a par with it. (Cue Religious War... )

Also, if we're going to take in technologies that aren't exactly software in and of themselves (like the Ogg formats), I'd have thought there's a strong argument for Jabber/XMPP being the "best of breed" instant messaging protocol - due to its flexible, distributed, extensible architecture, and its server-side solution to connecting to other protocols (via "gateways"/"transports").

I'm not so sure about samba, though - it's a decent way of connecting to existing shared resources, but Microsoft's SMB protocol on which it's based is horribly ugly, and if I could easily replace it I most certainly would. So it may be the best software for use with SMB, but I'm sure there are other systems that would do the job of a network filing system much better, were the need for compatibility with MS OSes relieved.

[IMSoP]

Vim is a great editor, but takes a lot of getting used to. I visit customers on site fairly often, and lots of cubicles are 'decorated' with a short list of useful commands for Vi.

However, I've got to big up Emacs. I use it as a word processor (using LaTeX and generating pdfs). As a text editor (html, XML, CSS etc), as a Wiki and blogging tool, calendar, diary, reminder handler etc.

It takes some getting used to (I recommend a good book, such as the one from O'Reilly), but once you're on top of it, you'll want to install it on every computer you use. And it is available in versions for Windows (where it usually comes as a pre-compiled binary, rather than compiling it yourself).

Have I gushed enough about how brilliant it is yet?

Richard

Hey, I am no fan of the SMB protocol, but we were not talking mainly about protocols.

Samba comes as a client / server pair, and is available for both unix and appple. the microsoft equivelent client is embedded into every recent version of their operating system.

The windows NT server (or xp professional) is quite notable for it's rapidly disapperaing profile. Repeatedly you find in businesses that one of the technical guys has a unix workstation and runs samba on it to make some of their data available, an then they start getting a lot of contacts from the NT administrators asking how come their NT box is so stable and has such good performance. Thus it isn't really a contender for "best of breed".

The competitors are very few. On the one hand you have Apple's proprietary equivelent, but that only works on apples and unix (thanks to a similar project to samba), and thus isn't really a contender for most uses.

The other main contender is NFS originally from sun (I think) which is the standard unix equivelent, but has massive problems of scalability.

There are a bunch of new protocols being developed without the problems, but they are not ready yet.

So samba has to be classed as best of breed, and is definately free.

a good case, well made!