A whole new world was thrown wide open with the advent of the concept of open source. The biggest advantage of open source projects is the easy availability of the source code and also the rights to tweak it or modify the code as we deem fit.

Listed below are some top open source projects that are making waves with their innovative ideas at this moment.

Teaching You Tools to Become Empowered

To build a successful business and career, you must always keep up with changes in the IT Marketplace. AWS, Office 365, LinkedIn, Sales Force, SEO, Social Media are just a few examples of where knowledge is a huge factor for success.

Training with HSG addresses your knowledge gaps and provides you with the requisite tools to outpace the competition.

ProjectLibre

Project Libre is the open source replacement of Microsoft Project. It was one among the top 10 open source projects of 2013. With over 6 million downloads; it has most certainly captured the imagination of people around the world. Details of project Libre could be found at http://www.projectlibre.org/ . Project Libre has separate release for mainframes. It also has a web based version which further increases its overall appeal. One of the main advantages is that it has a list of tasks that can be tracked to closure. It can also be used in conjunction with LibreOffice to provide a great set of tools to the team leaders.

Diaspora

Diaspora is an open source social networking application. http://diaspora.github.io/diaspora/

This social networking does not require any installation. Users can create an account on several of the servers that connects to the Diaspora network. One of the main advantages of Diaspora is that it is decentralized. By being decentralized it means that in lieu of storing the user’s information on big company servers as done by other social networking sites, Diaspora stores the user’s information on local servers known as pods. The user gets to choose which pod he would want to register in. The pods connect with each other seamlessly, so the user can connect with anyone in the world. Also true identity is not mandatory for using this social networking site.

Code Mirror

Coding and storing code on the desktops and laptops is soon becoming a thing of the past. Everything is moving towards the cloud and Code Mirror is a huge help in this process. Simply put, Code Mirror is a browser based code editor. It has a rich set of API’s and CSS themes, giving the developers a lot of functionality.  Some of its advantages include support for 60 languages, auto completion, various themes and add-ons, split view etc. It also supports most of the browsers. Further reading of code mirror could be done at http://codemirror.net/

While there is a stigma with open source technologies that corporations continue to prefer mainstream walled technologies supplied by vendors, the fact of the matter is that open source technologies are now more important than ever and some of the most complex and complicated codebases now utilize open source technologies. In addition, for those trying to make a career in technology in a real powerful way, open source technologies allow you the opportunity to showcase your abilities by actually improving these open source code bases in addition to building new applications built over these open source technologies.

Which other open source technology do you think is worth talking about which has far reaching applications in the near future? Let us know via comments