Ian Skerret points out a nice article @ eWeek.com about most influential open source applications ever.

Yet, I had a strange feeling reading the article, just like something was missing, or misplaced… so I’d rather make some changes or add some other app.

First of all maybe I’d include PostgreSQL in there too. It might be just a matter of personal taste, but I always liked it more than MySQL (or maybe it’s just I actually never forgave MySQL not to support a lots of SQL features till its current version now I like it much more than I did before).

Ok, I’m cheating: the RSA algorithm is not properly a software application. But since it is “open”, it has become the foundation for an entire generation of technology security products, and its authors did get a Turing award for that… I’d include it in my chart as well .

Furthermore some apps looks to be there just for historical reasons, while most pieces of software nowadays underlying a significant part of web based applications are missing (JBoss and Tomcat, just to name a few, but the list would be much longer).

That being said, I quite agree with the rest of the list: no doubt the Linux kernel is the first software most people would name if asked about most influential open source apps; no doubt Eclipse has become the universal development platform for a large portion of software developers, no matter the language.

Also, no doubt that Apache has been and still is the most widely used web server, even if market shares are changing, Netcraft’s latest survey reports. Nice post about Apache’s share shrinking here.

A good article about Open Source is in the April issue of IEEE Computer as well, probably a post about that will come next.