1. Open Source Software You Can Use Michelle Murrain Nonprofit Open Source Initiative MetaCentric Technology Advising October 23, 2008

2. Using Open Source Software

There are open source tools you can downloadright nowand use, no matter what your platform, that are useful, mature, secure and easy to use.

3. If your website is on a Unix or Linux based host you've been using open source software already. 4. Some of the software I'll talk about you might implement with help of a provider. 5. Types of Software

Operating Systems

6. Server software

Fileserver software

7. Web/mail server software 8. Database systems 9. Web application platforms Desktop applications 10. About this review This isnotan exhaustive list of all free and open source software that is mature and usable. But it is a good review of most of the software out there that is going to be useful to nonprofit organizations.For more tools, go to: http://socialsourcecommons.org 11. There are two common, mature open source operating systems...

Linux

RedHat/Fedora

12. Debian 13. Ubuntu

Kubuntu

14. Edubuntu 15. others Mandriva 16. SUSE 17. and many, many others...

BSD

FreeBSD

18. OpenBSD 19. NetBSD 20. Darwin (Basis of Mac OS X based on FreeBSD) 21. a few others, not much used 22. Operating Systems

Linux and BSD are very mature and strong on the server/appliance side

Varied flavors of Linux are used in network and security appliances

23. Linux and BSD are virtually ubiquitous in web hosting environments, from virtual host companies, to large enterprises (like Yahoo and Google.) 24. How to get Linux

There are commercial versions of Linux that include enterprise-level support (RedHat, Novell, Ubuntu)

25. You can buy a box sometimes (relatively inexpensive) in a store (may come with installation support.) 26. Download an ISO from the website of the distribution or a mirror, either directly or via bittorrent (won't come with any support except community support.) 27. Buy a CD from OSDisc, or another vendor (also won't come with support these just duplicate the CDs from the websites so they are cheap if bandwidth is an issue.) 28. 29. Server Applications

Samba allows Linux to act as a Windows file and print server very mature

30. Mailman mailing list manager 31. Applications for internet services and systems administration

very mature, some in use for 15 years or more

32. Server Applications

LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python)

This has become an industry standard web application development stack

33. Included in all unix-based virtual hosting services. 34. Each component of the stack isMature 35. PHP/Perl/Python are programming languages Ruby on Rails

Newer web framework that is gaining steam. Uses the Ruby language.

36. Server Applications

Web platforms/CMS

Drupal

37. Joomla 38. Plone 39. These three have become standard. They have overlapping feature sets, and they are differently customizable. But all are very solid CMS platforms 40. Others:

Typo3

41. Alfresco 42. Blogging platforms

• Wordpress specialized for blogging the others can be used that way, but if all you want is a blog Wordpress is great.

43. Movable Type also specialized for blogging

44. Drupal 45. Joomla 46. MediaWiki 47. Project Pier 48. Moodle (Courseware) 49. phpBB 50. Server Applications: Business Processes

CiviCRM server-based CRM/Fundraising package

51. SugarCRM server-based enterprise CRM package 52. SugarCRM 53. CiviCRM 54. Desktop Software

Mozilla Suite (all platforms)

Firefox

55. Thunderbird 56. Spinoffs:

Flock

57. Camino (Mac browser) 58. Sunbird (Calendaring - not so mature) Open Office (all platforms) 59. Adium (Mac OS X) 60. GIMP 61. Firefox 62. Thunderbird 63. OpenOffice.org

Has word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, drawing program, HTML and XML editors, and a database.

64. It will read and write Microsoft Office formats (except Office Open XML). 65. It uses open standards for native document formats 66. It exports PDFs 67. OO BaseAccess (way too immature) 68. 69. OO Writer OO Calc 70. GIMP 71. What FOSS is being used in nonprofits?

A recent NOSI survey found:

60% of respondents used FOSS on webservers

72. 80% used FOSS on Windows desktops (largely Firefox) 73. Many fewer (~20%) used FOSS as a desktop operating system 74. What are the barriers to FOSS adoption

Familiarity with proprietary tools

75. Lack of support 76. Lack of staff expertise 77. Lack of training 78. Resources

http://wiki.metacentric.org/- list of links for software mentioned here, and other resources.

79. http://nosi.net/projects/primer- Updated Open Source primer written in 2007. 80. http://nosi.net- NOSI's website.