My husband thinks I’m nuts because I love keeping catalogs of our books, movies, music, etc etc. I use LibraryThing for my books - and love it to bits, but if you want to catalog your other collections you might want to try out some of these open source applications that I found on OStatic:

• Tellico - This KDE app comes with handy templates for managing your book, wine, video game, coin, or stamp collection.
• Griffith - Keep your movie collection in order with this app that automatically grabs film information and cover art from the Internet.
• GCstar - Designed for use on systems with gtk2-perl, this app helps you maintain all kinds of collections from stamps to mini-vehicles.
• Alexandria - If you need a simple app to manage your monstrous book collection, then check out this Alexandria for the GNOME desktop.
• Sisimizi - This Windows-only video game database app comes packed with lots of handy features including a scripting system to fetch game info from the Internet, customizable data fields, and loan manager.

Learn more here.

I am a Google Office user because work has Google Apps for us all, but maybe I should start using Google for work and Zoho for home. In a post by Matt Asay he talks to Raju Vegesna, evangelist at Zoho. He notes that the back end of Zoho is completely open source.

Could Zoho.com exist if it were built with proprietary software?
Vegesna: Technically, we could do the same thing with proprietary software but the cost would be prohibitive. Imagine Google trying to run 600,000 servers on Windows. Could it do so technically? Probably. But it’s doubtful that it could give so many different services away for free if built on pricey, proprietary software.

Without open source I can’t imagine SaaS [software as a service] taking off. The economics simply wouldn’t work.

Open source gives us flexibility so that we can add our own layers of business logic. For example, we use OpenOffice for document conversion. There are some conversions that OpenOffice doesn’t support, however. Because it’s open source, we can split the code to allow our proprietary software pick up the slack where OpenOffice can’t handle transformations.

Most of our applications are built from the ground up by Zoho. Ninety-five percent of our employees are engineers. We use open source strategically but we need to be able to understand our code intimately, so writing it ourselves is important.

We use the best of open-source software, contribute back strategically, and write our own software where it makes sense.

Awesomeness! Read the entire post here.

We’ve all heard of OpenOffice and Google Docs - but did you know that you can have the best of both worlds with OpenGoo?? This from SmashingApps:

OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office. It is a complete solution for every organization to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents. You and your team can create and collaborate on:

• Text documents
• Presentations
• Task Lists
• E-mails
• Calendars
• Web Links
• Contacts

This means that libraries who can’t store info out on the web for security reasons can install a web office behind their firewall on their own servers and still benefit from collaborative tools!!! This is so awesome

How did I not know about this site before now? I just learned about Open Source Living from Chris at shelfless. The site explains itself:

Open Source Living is a dynamic archive of Open Source software (OSS) spanning all major platforms, inclusive of small to large scale projects. It aims to introduce and inform new users about viable OSS alternatives to corporate, closed source software.

This link is getting added to my bookmarks as well as every open source talk I give from now on!! I can’t wait to browse through and learn about new Apps I hadn’t heard of before.

I have been using Open Office on and off for years, but I must say that the newest release makes me want to stick to it.  This from Lifehacker:

The download may have hit a server near you last week, but today OpenOffice.org 3.0—the open-source Microsoft Office alternative—gets its official release. The OO.org servers have been hit hard, but so far download speeds seem to be holding up well.

If you haven’t tried it - now’s a good time to give it a whirl.

Technorati Tags: open office

I’m a Mac user - but not an iPhone user. I have a .Mac account, but don’t use it much … all that said, I think this may still be of interest to those of you open source fans with iPhones or Macs. This from TechCrunch:

One of the big announcements yesterday from Apple was that it is replacing its .Mac service with MobileMe, a new service that will sync your email, contacts, calendar, photos, and files between your iPhone, Mac desktop, and a Windows PC. It will cost $99 per year. But if you want most of the functionality of MobileMe without the cost, you will be able to download an app from Funambol at the official iPhone App Store on July 11 that does many of the same things.

Funambol offers open-source mobile syncing software for email, contacts and calendars. It works with Exchange, Domino, POP, or IMAP email servers, and already supports hundreds of different phone models. It even works on current (jailbroken) models of the iPhone.

The software won’t sync your files or photos, but since it is open-source there is nothing stopping other developers from building such services on its underlying synchronization engine.

Technorati Tags: iphone, open source

I just learned about a neat tool that combines my two passions, open source and web 2.0. Sun Wiki Publisher is an OpenOffice extension that lets you publish to any MediaWiki that you have credentials for. What a neat addition to OpenOffice.

If you can’t wait for the official release of OpenOffice 3.0, you can download the beta which is now available for download. This via DownloadSquad:

So what’s new under the hood? Here are some of the highlights:

• OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the first version to run on Mac OS X (there are also Linux and Windows versions)
• OpenOffice.org Start Center gives you a one stop shop for creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, databases, or templates
• Support for collaborative spreadsheet editing
• Improved Writer notes features
• View multiple Writer pages while editing a document
• Improved crop features in Draw and Impress
• Support for ODF and MS Office 2007 formats

Sounds worth trying out … now if I could just find some time to test it out!! If you get to play with it, feel free to let us know how it works.

Not Your Average Geeks has a post reviewing 9 open source e-commerce applications.

• OsCommerce
• Zencart
• VirtueMart
• Magento
• Cubecart
• X-Cart
• LiteCommerce
• Shopify

Read all about them.

I just received an announcement about a neat new open source project.

PaperWorld3D is a mix of two open source project which is PaperVision3D on the frontend and Red 5 on the backend. It is released by the guys behind Influxis and Red5Server who is Trevor Burton and John Grden. The whole idea is to create quickly a 3D Massively Multiplayer Online Game for the Adobe Flash 9 player. The project works with modules and xml for configuration. It also have a platform for tracking and managing players and their avatars. The whole thing works on UDP protocol so the server is always right on the pace for all the players who’s logged on the server session.

From the website:

PaperWorld is many things - it lets you create multi-user applications, yes, but it also gives you the tools to create large games, quickly, localise them to a particular language or region, and manage everything in your workflow - so your designers don’t need to code, and your coders don’t need to design, and anyone with a basic knowledge of xml can edit a config file and setup or edit a game quickly without having to recompile and deploy.

Sounds pretty nifty! Learn more.