InfoWorld’s picked up best open source applications for the year 2013, though to cover this post to our readers since our main focus is on Open Source Business Applications.

Nginx

Nginx – pronounced “engine x” is an open source reverse proxy server for HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols, as well as a load balancer, HTTP cache, and a web server (origin server).

The nginx project started with a strong focus on high concurrency, high performance and low memory usage. It is licensed under the 2-clause BSD-like license and it runs on Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, as well as on other *nix flavors. It also has a proof of concept port for Microsoft Windows.

Nginx was initially released in the year 2002.

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Varnish

Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites. In contrast to other web accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a client-side cache, or Apache and nginx, which are primarily origin servers, Varnish was designed as an HTTP accelerator. Varnish is focused exclusively on HTTP, unlike other proxy servers that often support FTP, SMTP and other network protocols.

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Maria DB

MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL relational database management system, the impetus being the community maintenance of its free status under the GNU GPL. As a fork of a leading open source software system, it is notable for being led by its original developers and triggered by concerns over direction by an acquiring commercial company Oracle. Contributors are required to share their copyright with Monty Program AB.

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WordPress

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content-management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL, which runs on a web hosting service. Features include a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by more than 18.9% of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites.

WordPress is one of our best Open Source CMS application, Easy to use and customize as per the business requirements.

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Alfresco

Alfresco is a free/libre enterprise content management system for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems. Alfresco comes in three flavors:

• Alfresco Community Edition is free software, LGPL, licensed open source and open standards. It has some important limitations in terms of scalability and availability, since the clustering feature has been removed from the community repository and is only available in the enterprise edition.
• Alfresco Enterprise Edition is commercially & proprietary licensed open source, open standards and enterprise scale. Its design is geared towards users who require a high degree of modularity and scalable performance.
• Alfresco Cloud Edition (Alfresco in the cloud) is the SaaS version of Alfresco.

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vTiger CRM

vtiger CRM is an open source CRM application that was forked from SugarCRM with the intention of being a fully open source CRM application with comparable functionality to SugarCRM and Salesforce.com.

It offers reporting, a customer portal and an Outlook plugin in its free edition, whereas those functions are in paid versions of the other CRM applications.

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Magento

Magento is an open source e-commerce web application that was launched on March 31, 2008. It was developed by Varien (now Magento Inc) with help from the programmers within the open source community but is owned solely by Magento Inc. Magento was built using the Zend Framework. It uses the entity-attribute-value (EAV) database model to store data.

The Magento Community Edition is the only free version of Magento available.

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Feng Office

Feng Office is a Software Development Company known for developing Feng Office Collaboration Platform and associated services:

• Feng Sky is Feng Office on Demand provided as SaaS
• Feng Onsite is Feng Office platform installed in External Servers
• Feng Office Community Edition is the Open Source self-installed and self supported version

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Project Libre

ProjectLibre is an open source project management software. It intends to be a complete desktop replacement for Microsoft Project. ProjectLibre runs on the Java Platform, allowing it to run on Linux, Mac OS or Windows operating systems.
ProjectLibre was released in August 2012.

It has been voted as the open source Project of the Month for October 2012 by the SourceForge community. ProjectLibre is supportive of LibreOffice; it complements their replacement of Microsoft Office components.

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GnuCash

GnuCash is a free software accounting program that implements a double-entry bookkeeping system. It was initially aimed at developing capabilities similar to Intuit, Inc.’s Quicken application, but also has features for small business accounting.[9] Recent development has been focused on adapting to modern desktop support-library requirements.

GnuCash is part of the GNU Project, and runs on Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like platforms.A Microsoft Windows (2000 or newer) port was made available starting with the 2.2.0 series.

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FrontAccounting

FrontAccounting is an open source web-based accounting software for small and medium enterprises, written in PHP, using MySQL. It allows Double-Entry Accounting and is integrated with modules that support most common business processes. FrontAccounting is multiuser, multilingual and multicurrency. It is part of Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions, and a demo is available online.

FrontAccounting started as WebERP fork, and its source code is available on SourceForge for download. In 2012 it passed the milestone of 100,000 downloads from Sourceforge. Number of language packs are available at SourceForge but some of them require further development.

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OrangeHRM

OrangeHRM Inc. is a software company based in Secaucus, New Jersey. The company produces the human resource management (HRIS) solution, OrangeHRM, that is available both as an open source and an advanced hosted application (SaaS). OrangeHRM is released under the GNU General Public License.

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ERPNext

ERPNext is an Open Source integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software developed by Web Notes Technologies Pvt Ltd and is built on MySQL database system using a Python (software) based server-side framework.
ERPNext is an open source alternative to NetSuite and QAD, similar to OpenERP and Openbravo

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OpenBravo

Openbravo is another leading Open source ERP software company.  The company is offer two products:

1. Openbravo ERP
2. Openbravo POS.

For the worldwide distribution and implementations of its software, Openbravo relies heavily on its partner network.The company is a member of the Open Solutions Alliance, a non-profit organization working for open-source standardization. Not to mention Openbravo is three-time winner of Infoworld’s Bossie award for best open source software application for Openbravo ERP, last awarded in August 2011, and this year again.

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UniCenta oPos

uniCenta oPOS is one of the most downloaded Touchscreen POS applications on the available on the internet today and is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

It’s equally at home running on an iOS or Android device when using a Remote connection client and browser. It’s a great solution for mixed-use environments and is in use around the world in all sorts of retail outlets from Bars and Cafes through to Restaurants and Supermarkets.

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OpenERP

OpenERP is an open-source enterprise resource planning (ERP) software developed by OpenERP s.a. OpenERP is an open source alternative to SAP ERP, Microsoft Dynamics and other enterprise resource planning software. OpenERP is licensed under the terms of the AGPL license.

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OpenEMR

OpenEMR is a Free and Open Source, Practice management and Electronic Medical Records software application. It is ONC Complete Ambulatory EHR certified and it features fully integrated electronic medical records, practice management, scheduling, electronic billing, internationalization, and free support. It can run on Microsoft systems, Unix-like systems (Linux, UNIX, and BSD systems), Mac OS X and other platforms.

OpenEMR is one of the most popular free electronic medical records in use today with over 3,700 downloads per month. The community maintains the official OpenEMR web site at open-emr.org.

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Pentaho

One of our most favourite and truly accepted reporting software Pentaho also wonthe Bossie awards in Best Open Source applications. Pentaho was founded in 2004 by five founders.  It offers a suite of open source Business Intelligence (BI) products called Pentaho Business Analytics providing data integration, OLAP services, reporting, dashboarding, data mining and ETL capabilities. Pentaho is headquartered in Orlando, FL, USA.

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Colosa ProcessMaker

ProcessMaker is another leading open source business process and workflow management software developed by Colosa Inc., A developer of software solutions that enable companies to simplify workflow through the capture and automation of business processes. Colosa enjoys a network of global partners that can implement and support ProcessMaker software for organizations of all sizes.

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Activiti BPM Platform

Activiti is a light-weight workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) Platform targeted at business people, developers and system admins. Its core is a super-fast and rock-solid BPMN 2 process engine for Java. It’s open-source and distributed under the Apache license. Activiti runs in any Java application, on a server, on a cluster or in the cloud. It integrates perfectly with Spring, it is extremely lightweight and based on simple concepts.

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Bonita

Bonita BPM is an open-source business process management and workflow suite created in 2001. It was started in France National Institute for Research in Computer Science, and then had incubated several years inside of the French computer science company Groupe Bull. Since 2009, the development of Bonita is supported by a company dedicated to this activity: Bonitasoft.

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Mule

Mule is a lightweight enterprise service bus (ESB) and integration framework. It can handle services and applications using disparate transport and messaging technologies. The platform is Java-based, but can broker interactions between other platforms such as .NET using web services or sockets.
The architecture is a scalable, highly distributable object broker that can seamlessly handle interactions across legacy systems, in-house applications, and almost all modern transports and protocols.

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SwitchYard

SwitchYard is a lightweight service delivery framework providing full lifecycle support for developing, deploying, and managing service-oriented applications.

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ServiceStack

Service Stack was started in the year 2008 as an open source replacement for Windows Communication Foundation services, this .Net integration stack is complete, well engineered, and fast. Service Stack is simple to add to a project via NuGet, and the services easily allow you to consume XML, JSON, or SOAP objects. NoSQL, messaging, logging, all work seamlessly together.

There is an active community, with plenty of users on StackOverflow for problem resolution.

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EDX

EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise composed of 29 leading global institutions, the xConsortium. EDX was founded inMay 2012, The Open edX platform is implemented mostly in Python (with some Ruby and NodeJS as well) and the code is being made available under an AGPL license.

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InBloom

inBloom Inc. is an organization running a database for managing student data for allowing school districts to manage student information. It is a non-profit organization, and the actual operation of the database is done by News Corporation.

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BigBlueButton 

BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system developed primarily for distance education. BigBlueButton supports multiple audio and video sharing, presentations with extended whiteboard capabilities – such as a pointer, zooming and drawing – public and private chat, desktop sharing, integrated VoIP using FreeSWITCH, and support for presentation of PDF documents and Microsoft Office documents. Moreover, users may enter the conference in one of two roles: viewer or moderator.

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TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library

The Turnkey Linux Virtual Appliance Library is an open source project developing a free virtual appliance library of pre-packaged servers based on Debian (previous versions based on Ubuntu) that can be deployed on virtual machines, in cloud computing infrastructures or installed in physical computers.

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Notes : 

The above are not rankings 

Sources :

• Infoworld.com
• Wikipedia