I need to know more about open source, especialy the development side of it.. what systems are avail

[Ben Tilly]

On 10/1/06, Paulina Msibi <PaulinaMs at statssa.gov.za> wrote:
> I need to know more about open source, especialy the development side of
> it.. what systems are available and what languages are they developed
> with

You aren't asking for much, are you?

The short answer is that there is so much open source software
available, in so many languages, that you're better off saying what
you'd like to do and finding out what is available for that.  If you
began trying to learn about all of the open source projects that are
available you'd never finish - people produce it faster than you can
learn about it!

There are many archives.  Here are a few to get you started:

- http://sourceforge.net/ is a popular place for people to put
projects.  There are over 130,000 projects, at differing stages of
quality and completeness, ranging from "vague idea" to high quality
working products.

- http://search.cpan.org/ has modules to use in Perl programs.  (Perl
is a programming language.)  There are over 10,000 available modules,
for a wide variety of tasks.  Quality varies, but is generally
reasonable.

- http://www.ubuntu.com/ is a Linux distribution.  (Linux is an
operating system.)  It is free to download, install and customize.
There are over 16,000 pieces of available software that are
pre-packaged for Ubuntu of many different kinds.  Packages included in
Ubuntu should be of fairly good quality.

Just to give a sense, an Ubuntu system using pre-packaged Ubuntu
software can be used for anything from a desktop, to a database
server, to anything in between.  (Router, webserver, email server -
you name it, it can do it.)  A developer on Ubuntu can easily develop
in a wide variety of languages.  Major languages include C, C++, Java,
bash, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, etc.
Every one of these languages comes with available libraries for a
range of tasks.

And, of course, Ubuntu is just one distribution of Linux.  All of the
software that is available for Ubuntu is also available for other
distributions of Linux.  Most of it is available for other open source
operating systems (eg FreeBSD).  A large portion of it has been ported
to proprietary operating systems, such as Windows.  (Certainly there
are open source implementations of every one of the programming
languages that I named for Ubuntu that run on Windows.)

What did you need to knwo this for?

Cheers,
Ben