Interesting list. A lot more can be added to it though. We need to cover more on the sysadmin side as well. Something that competes with IBM's Tivoli which is an amazing software targeting its own niche. On the open source front we have FreeIPA (http://www.freeipa.com) and Zivios Enterprise Management (http://www.zivios.org) targeting a similar niche.

There's no doubt about it. Openoffice.org is good enough to be a preferred ofice suite even if you had to pay something for it. I've used it in a busy office with many people, some of whom didn't even realise they weren't using a Microsoft product. A number of its features are even superior to MS Office - although there are some annoying ones as well. Linux has been excellent for ages.

But open source isn't everything it's sometimes made out to be. There are some crushing disappointments - one of which is Turbocash accounting. Although it has a lot of ease-of-use features and full double -entry accounting it requires constant monitoring to ensure that the databases aren't corrupted and that the backups are available to restore when this happens. Faced with the prospect of having a computer professional constantly checking on the accountant in our organisation to see that everything was OK, we quickly concluded that we would save a bundle buying proprietary software.

I think this article will be very useful to people looking to get started with open source. Open Office is an great alternative to the MS office suite.

Another one of these examples would be the WebGUI content management system. WebGUI is another CMS (similar to Alfresco) that is quietly being adopted by US government agencies, Global 1000 companies, and universities. These are some of the examples I saw on their website.

We use it in our environment and we chose it because of its incredible feature set and flexibility. And obviously because it's free and open source as well. :)

Plone is another good option if it meets your specific criteria. Anyway, there are lots of great open source solutions out there. A great site for finding them is www.cmsmatrix.org!

I think that this is a heavily biased article that is geared towards ousting Microsoft. I agree that OpenOffice is a great package but i think a little more scope in the articles is required. honestly, who is going to try and implement a Windows to Linux migration, especially in a financial crisis, more likely we are not going to spend money or resources on something that is working.

Why not address more pressing issue like system administration, patch management, web services where Open Source is a fantastic alternative to proprietary software. These items are hard enough to justify to the business when money is falling from the skies, it would be near impossible now.

OpenOffice is a great tool for personal use, but as soon as you need to share your work with someone, LOOK OUT! You'll lose fonts and formatting faster than you can blink. It makes it very difficult to collaborate with someone who doesn't use OO, so it really is only a tool for people who want to create and edit docs and spreadsheets for their own work. Free is good, but keep in mind that you get what you pay for!

You also have the option at looking at strart up's who are looking for Bleeding edge early adopters. I got a CMDB of sorts to track changes and software states across my network for nothing by tapping up a Start up called Ephor Technologies. Does the job and you can always help stear their later development to suit your needs.