Open Source Software List: 2017 Ultimate List – Datamation

It's become a annual tradition at Datamation to publish an complete roundup of all the open source projects we've featured throughout the year. This year's update includes a vast trove of open source software: 1,343 different projects, from 138 different categories, including two brand new categories.

This year's open source list has quite a few new additions related to cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). It also has quite a few new projects related to marketing software.

Please note that this is not a ranking. The projects are organized into categories and then listed alphabetically within the categories.

As always, if you know of additional open source software that you'd like to see us cover in future lists, feel free to note them in the Comments section below.

Table of Contents

Sure, youre a Windows user in fact youre using an up to date Windows OS. But in todays world, its still entirely likely youre looking for the best open source software for your PC. This list gathers some familiar names with lesser known apps, all with an eye toward boosting your Windows 10 machine. Which app do you think is the best open source software for Win10

There are countless websites that offer extensive lists of open source software to download. But finding the best open source website is easier said than done. To help, weve compiled a list of the very best open source websites let the downloading begin.

In this aggregation of open source BI tools, youll certainly see some famous names: MySQL, Pentaho, along with some names that get less buzz as well. Of course in the rapidly changing business intelligence market, todays big names could easily be surpassed over time by a little known tool feature sets change quickly. Which open source BI tool on this list will be most popular in the years ahead?

Theres no debate about it: Windows XP is an aging operating system. For those looking to replace it and yes, its time with an open source operating system, this is the list for you. This survey of open source operating systems includes superstars like Ubuntu along with solid players like Knoppix. Come on, replace that old Windows OS!

It makes perfect sense: youre using financial software to track your expenses, so naturally youre interested in open source financial software. Open source much of which is a free download is made for penny pinchers. The open source financial software in this list may save you, in some cases, hundreds of dollars. A penny saved is a penny earned.

Its clear that, as value propositions go, this ones a no-brainer: replace your expensive apps with low-cost or free open source applications. Certainly theres debate about feature sets: some commercial software partisans argue that the feature sets for open source applications do not match their commercial counterparts. Undoubtedly the other side disagrees strongly. You can be the judge download a few open source applications and check them out. Do they compare?

Open source business software is, in many cases, the ideal solution for small businesses. If youre as cash-strapped as many SMBs, youll certainly want to look at this list of open source business software. Bottom line: free or low cost is better than high priced, even if that requires giving up some familiar software choices to explore options that are lesser known. If money is tight, open source business software can often be a useful option.

1. The Accessibility Project

Launched in 2013, this site aims to provide information on making other websites accessible to people with a variety of impairments, particularly those who are blind. You can read the content at the link above; if you'd like to contribute, visit the project's GitHub page. Operating System: OS Independent

2. Edoceo Imperium

This web-based accounting package was created with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in mind. It includes CRM, work order and invoice capabilities as well as standard accounting features. Check out the online demo to see it in action. Operating System: OS Independent

3. FrontAccounting

Another web-based accounting option for SMBs, FrontAccounting boasts inventory tracking and manufacturing management abilities. It's been downloaded more than 200,000 times. Operating System: OS Independent

4. GnuCash

GnuCash combines personal finance software with small business accounting software, which some small business owners find helpful. It can track investments, create graphs, import financial data, set up scheduled transactions and perform standard double-entry accounting. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

5. LedgerSMB

LedgerSMB combines ERP and accounting capabilities in a single package, and it also includes a flexible development framework for extending its features. It has been downloaded more than 86,000 times since 2006. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

6. TurboCASH

Used by more than 80,000 businesses, TurboCASH is a flexible accounting package that compares favorably with QuickBooks and Sage. It was created in the UK but also has a chart of accounts and currency features designed for U.S. businesses. Operating System: Windows

7. OpenDisc

The OpenDisc project collects many of the most popular open source applications for Windows into one download. You can also get the project on a CD for a donation of $10. Operating System: Windows

8. ASSP

ASSP claims to be "the absolute best SPAM fighting weapon that the world has ever known!" It offers easy, browser-based setup and works with most mail servers. Operating System: OS Independent.

9. MailScanner

Downloaded more than 1.3 million times, MailScanner is based on SpamAssassin and works with anti-virus software like ClamAV to protect mail servers at companies or ISPs. Support is available through third-party companies. Operating System: OS Independent.

10. Scrollout F1

This full-featured mail security solution incorporates anti-spam, anti-virus and other capabilities with an interface that the project creators say is as easy to use as a car radio. Paid support is available. Operating System: Windows, Linux.

11. SpamAssassin

This Apache project claims to be the "#1 Enterprise Open-Source Spam Filter." It uses a wide variety of methods to identify and block spam, and it works with nearly all mail servers. Operating System: primarily Linux and OS X, although Windows versions are available.

12. SpamBayes

SpamBayes uses statistical algorithms to calculate the probability that an incoming message is spam, and it adapts over time as spammers change their methods. It's available as a plug-in for many popular email services and clients, including Outlook, Thunderbird and others. Operating System: OS Independent.

13. ClamAV

One of the most popular open source security applications, ClamAV has been incorporated into many different products and has been called "the de facto standard for mail gateway scanning." The core program works on UNIX-based systems, but the website also offers information on Immunet, a ClamAV-based Windows solution that is available in both free and paid versions. Operating System: Linux, but front-ends and additional versions are available for other OSes.

14. ClamTk

This variation on ClamAV adds an easy-to-use GUI to the popular anti-virus engine. Now ten years old, this is a mature project that is included in many Linux distributions. Operating System: Linux.

15. ClamWin Free Antivirus

This Windows-based version of ClamAV boasts more than 600,000 users. It offers a scanning scheduler, integration with Windows Explorer and Outlook, automatic downloads of the updated malware database and support for Windows 7 and 8. Operating System: Windows.

16. Caffe

The brainchild of a UC Berkeley PhD candidate, Caffe is a deep learning framework based on expressive architecture and extensible code. It's claim to fame is its speed, which makes it popular with both researchers and enterprise users. According to its website, it can process more than 60 million images in a single day using just one NVIDIA K40 GPU. It is managed by the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center (BVLC), and companies like NVIDIA and Amazon have made grants to support its development.

17. CNTK

Short for Computational Network Toolkit, CNTK is one of Microsoft's open source artificial intelligence tools. It boasts outstanding performance whether it is running on a system with only CPUs, a single GPU, multiple GPUs or multiple machines with multiple GPUs. Microsoft has primarily utilized it for research into speech recognition, but it is also useful for applications like machine translation, image recognition, image captioning, text processing, language understanding and language modeling.

18. Deeplearning4j

Deeplearning4j is an open source deep learning library for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It runs in distributed environments and integrates with both Hadoop and Apache Spark. It makes it possible to configure deep neural networks, and it's compatible with Java, Scala and other JVM languages.

The project is managed by a commercial company called Skymind, which offers paid support, training and an enterprise distribution of Deeplearning4j.

19. Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit

Like CNTK, the Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK) is one of Microsoft's open source artificial intelligence tools. Designed for use in big data applications, it aims to make it faster to train AI systems. It consists of three key components: the DMTK framework, the LightLDA topic model algorithm, and the Distributed (Multisense) Word Embedding algorithm. As proof of DMTK's speed, Microsoft says that on an eight-cluster machine, it can "train a topic model with 1 million topics and a 10-million-word vocabulary (for a total of 10 trillion parameters), on a document collection with over 100-billion tokens," a feat that is unparalleled by other tools.

20. H2O

Focused more on enterprise uses for AI than on research, H2O has large companies like Capital One, Cisco, Nielsen Catalina, PayPal and Transamerica among its users. It claims to make is possible for anyone to use the power of machine learning and predictive analytics to solve business problems. It can be used for predictive modeling, risk and fraud analysis, insurance analytics, advertising technology, healthcare and customer intelligence.

It comes in two open source versions: standard H2O and Sparkling Water, which is integrated with Apache Spark. Paid enterprise support is also available.

21. NuPIC

Managed by a company called Numenta, NuPIC is an open source artificial intelligence project based on a theory called Hierarchical Temporal Memory, or HTM. Essentially, HTM is an attempt to create a computer system modeled after the human neocortex. The goal is to create machines that "approach or exceed human level performance for many cognitive tasks."

In addition to the open source license, Numenta also offers NuPic under a commercial license, and it also offers licenses on the patents that underlie the technology.

22. OpenCyc

Developed by a company called Cycorp, OpenCyc provides access to the Cyc knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine. It includes more than 239,000 terms, about 2,093,000 triples, and about 69,000 owl:sameAs links to external semantic data namespaces. It is useful for rich domain modeling, semantic data integration, text understanding, domain-specific expert systems and game AIs. The company also offers two other versions of Cyc: one for researchers that is free but not open source and one for enterprise use that requires a fee.

23. OpenNN

Designed for researchers and developers with advanced understanding of artificial intelligence, OpenNN is a C++ programming library for implementing neural networks. Its key features include deep architectures and fast performance. Extensive documentation is available on the website, including an introductory tutorial that explains the basics of neural networks. Paid support for OpenNNis available through Artelnics, a Spain-based firm that specializes in predictive analytics.

24. SystemML

First developed by IBM, SystemML is now an Apache big data project. It offers a highly-scalable platform that can implement high-level math and algorithms written in R or a Python-like syntax. Enterprises are already using it to track customer service on auto repairs, to direct airport traffic and to link social media data with banking customers. It can run on top of Spark or Hadoop.

25. TensorFlow

TensorFlow is one of Google's open source artificial intelligence tools. It offers a library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. It can run on a wide variety of different systems with single- or multi-CPUs and GPUs and even runs on mobile devices. It boasts deep flexibility, true portability, automatic differential capabilities and support for Python and C++. The website includes a very extensive list of tutorials and how-tos for developers or researchers interested in using or extending its capabilities.

26. Torch

Torch describes itself as "a scientific computing framework with wide support for machine learning algorithms that puts GPUs first." The emphasis here is on flexibility and speed. In addition, it's fairly easy to use with packages for machine learning, computer vision, signal processing, parallel processing, image, video, audio and networking. It relies on a scripting language called LuaJIT that is based on Lua.

27. Celestia

Travel virtually to anywhere in the known universe at any time with Celestia. It displays hundreds of thousands of celestial bodies as they would appear in the night skies. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

28. KStars

Similar to Stellarium, KStars lets users view "up to 100 million stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects, all 8 planets, the sun and moon, and thousands of comets and asteroids." It also includes a number of tools helpful for amateur astronomers, such as an observation list, an FOV editor, a sky calendar, supernova alerts and a glossary of technical terms. (Note that in order to use KStars on Windows, you'll have to download KDE for Windows.) Operating System: Windows, Linux

29. Stellarium

Another option for budding astronomers, this one confines the point of view to planet earth rather than allowing users to zoom throughout the universe, but it is so accurate that it is used by many planetariums. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

30. Amarok

Amarok invites users to rediscover their music. It integrates with a variety of Web services and includes features like dynamic playlists, collection management, bookmarking, file tracking and import from other music databases, including iTunes. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS.

31. Ardour

Designed for use by professional audio engineers, musicians, soundtrack editors and composers, Ardour is a complete audio recording, mixing and editing suite. Key features include support for most hardware, flexible recording, unlimited multichannel tracks, unlimited undo/redo and much more. Operating System: Linux, OS X

32. aTunes

This Java-based music player and manager displays complete informationincluding lyricsfor the song currently playing. It's a good option for users with particularly large music collections. Operating System: OS Independent

33. Audacious

Unlike some audio players, Audacious doesn't use a lot of system resources, so it doesn't degrade system performance when you're using your PC for other tasks as well as listening to music. The latest update offers improved playlist shuffling, easier recording of Internet streams and a better equalizer interface. Operating System: Windows, Linux.

34. Audacity

A perennial favorite among Linux desktop users, Audacity gets hundreds of thousands of downloads per month. It was updated in July with new scrubbing and seeking features, preset effects and improved plug-in installation. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X

35. CDex

Downloaded more than 60 million times, CDex is a simple, handy tool for converting CDs to data files. It supports multiple file formats, including WAV, MP3, FLAC, AAC, WMA and OGG. Operating System: Windows.

36. Cdrtools

This suite of command-line tools includes the cdrecord CD/DVD/Blu-ray recording software, as well as tools for reading optical media, extracting audio, and more. It's a mature project that has been around for quite a few years. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.

37. cdrtfe

Cdrtfe serves as a front-end for cdrtools and some other command-line recording applications. It can burn audio CDs, data discs, bootable discs, DVD-Video discs, ISO images and other types of optical media. The latest version supports Windows 10. Operating System: Windows.

38. Clementine

Based on an older version of Amarok, Clementine focuses on providing "a fast and easy-to-use interface for searching and playing your music." It supports Internet radio streams, cloud computing services like Dropbox and Google Drive, CUE sheets, tabbed playlists, audio CD playback and much more. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X, Android.

39. DeaDBeeF

This self-proclaimed "ultimate music player" supports a very long list of file formats. Key features include cue sheet support, tabbed playlists, cover art display, 18-band graphic equalizer, tag editor, gapless playback and more. Operating System: Linux, Unix, Android.

40. EasyTAG

EasyTAG allows users to view and edit the tag fields on MP3, MP2, MP4/AAC, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, Monkey's Audio, and WavPack files. It includes a tree-based browser and CDDB support for manual and automatic searches. Operating System: Windows, Linux

41. Exaile

Another option for Linux users, Exaile offers both playback and a powerful music manager. Key features include smart playlists, advanced track tagging, multiple plug-ins, automatic album art, lyrics and much more. Operating System: Linux.

42. FlacSquisher

This tool was made for audiophiles who like to keep their original music in the lossless FLAC file format. FlacSquisher converts those files to MP3s so that users can take them with them on mobile devices without taking up too much space. Operating System: Windows.

43. Fre:ac

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Open Source Software List: 2017 Ultimate List - Datamation