James Maguire at Datamation published an article late last year about the favourite projects of FLOSS industry and community leaders. Uh huh, I’m still catching up with 2007! 
With my GNOME Foundation hat on I thought that, rather than taking the easy way out by plugging a bunch of our rocking applications, it might be cool to show off some of the projects that make GNOME rock:
- WordPress and WordPress MU (multi-user)
Blogs and planet sites have had a huge impact on communication in the FLOSS world. GNOME and WordPress share many of the same philosophies about usability and development, so it’s not surprising that heaps of GNOME contributors use WordPress — and we’ve recently deployed WordPress MU on blogs.gnome.org. WordPress rocks.
- Bugzilla
Perpetually overlooked as one of the most important FLOSS apps, even though it is absolutely crucial to the development of so many: Mozilla, GNOME, Apache, Eclipse, OpenOffice.org… the list goes on — even NASA uses it! Bugzilla makes GNOME rock harder.
- One Laptop Per Child
Using GNOME technologies throughout, the OLPC project has created an amazing user interface for kids, and contributed some great technologies to the FLOSS world along the way — coming soon to GNOME! The best bit is that OLPC will take Software Freedom to millions, if not billions of kids around the world.
- Cairo
One of the classic ‘behind the scenes’ projects that has contributed to so many advances throughout the FLOSS world. It lies deep in the core of GNOME’s rendering technologies, not only delivering beautiful graphics, but a totally delicious API for software developers as well.
- Evolution
Okay, okay, I have to plug at least one GNOME application! Evo might not be the newest or sexiest GNOME app, but it is indispensible as one of our core communications tools, and its features help many users shift to FLOSS platforms – particularly in corporate environments. The next release will even have Google Calendar and Exchange MAPI support — sweet!
Check out the article for plenty of rocking Open Source projects suggested by other FLOSS industry and community folks.