Where does Open Source lead? Where are Open Source offerings not as good as the market leaders?

Technology Evaluation Summary

What are the Open Source products? What are their competitors?

Open Source Offerings and their Competitors

What are the market dynamics? Features?

Server Operating Systems

PC and Desktop Operating Systems

Web Servers, Application Servers, Portal

Open Source Databases and Competitors

Open Source Summaries in

Excel, OpenOffice, and one web page.

Books

Choose the Best

As you build your business, you want to choose the best.

In some cases such as server operating systems and web servers the best
offerings are Open Source while in many cases proprietary software is still the
best.

What we have observed is the rate of innovation and improvement in Open Source
far exceeds that in proprietary software. For example, as Linux expands the gap
away from the proprietary OS competitors, RDBMS offerings are rapidly closing
the gap to their competitors.

Feel free to use our comparison summaries to stimulate your decision process.
Due to a lack of solid comparisons and even direct comparability some of the
evaluation points are subjective; but, this subjectivity arises from our deep
experience with software and business. We believe you can use the provided
links to help you further refine your thinking. And please send us any good
links you find that compare open source products to their proprietary
competitors.

Thank you and Best luck,
Max Weber
April 2005