Perl based open source products
This is the list of all the Perl-based open source products I am aware of.
Especially if we focus on products serving the generic public. Not just other Perl developers.
Thanks to all the people, but especially to Dean Hamstead and Renee Baecker, who sent me tons of links.
I tried to check which one of these products allow people to make money from them. How do the web-site of the open-source project promote the businesses. I'd be very interested to know which projects are actually supported by their commercial backers, and how do they feel about each other?
Are they run by a single company? Is there a commercial interest behind the project shared by several individuals or companies? Is the project purely fun-based?
CMS / Publishing systems / Blog engines / wikis
This is a mix of platforms. Some stared out as Content Management Systems (CMS) others as wikis, yet others as blog engines. In the end there is a huge overlap between what they do so I put them in one category.
Movable Type is a publishing platform, though I think it is mostly known
as a blog engine. It is backed by the company called Six Apart that provides a
hosted version of Movable Type.
blogs.perl.org is running Movable Type.
It is sopped being an open source product. The latest Open source release was 5.2.9.
WebGUI is a content management system (CMS) created by
Plain Black. It is a very business oriented CMS. On the web site, you can find
a number of partners that provide commercial support and customization
services. This looks like a living ecosystem of open-source and business.
Twiki is one of the best-known wiki software with an orientation to support
companies. It is built primarily by the company with the same name that also provides
cloud-based hosted Twiki service.
There are a number of consultants providing support for Twiki. They are listed on the web site in
a very prominent place.
Foswiki is a wiki base an enterprise collaboration platform. There
are individuals providing commercial support for Foswiki.
Bricolage CMS is a web publishing system providing workflow management for publishers.
It then generates pages that can be either static or even use some other language to be dynamic.
(Wikipedia)
Krang CMS Open Source web publisher. It is used by several web-sites but as I can see development
is not too active.
Blosxom is a simple blog engine generating static pages.
For more information also check out the Wikipedia page of Blosxom.
There is also a new community site for Blosxom.
Cyclone3 and Open-Source Web 2.0 Application Framework. It uses XUL which, if I am not mistaken,
was discontinued by Mozilla.
BlazeBlogger is a simple to use but capable CMS for the command line.
Galileo CMS written by Joel Berger.
Blio, a static blogging engine.
XIMS Content Management System
Dreamwidth is a community system for shared blogging. It was forked from the last
open source version of Live Journal.
Angerwhale is a Catalyst-based blogging package.
As I can see it has been removed from CPAN and has not been updated since 2009.
Simpleness CMS and open source Content Management system.
Source code is available on GitHub.
Help-desk, Request and Bug tracking
OTRS is a Help-desk and IT Service Management software. Sort of like a bug
tracking system geared to the enterprise. It is created and developed by company with the same name based in Germany.
Request Tracker is a bug and issue tracking system written and supported by
Best Practical. It is used by CPAN
and the Perl development team as well.
(Wikipedia)
Bugzilla is the well known bug-tracking system developed by and for Mozilla.
It is used in quite a lot of companies. I think a few people offer Bugzilla administration and customization as paid
service.
Mailing list
Sympa is a program for managing mailing lists. You can find the list of companies providing
commercial support for Sympa.
Dada Mail is a program for managing mailing lists. They provide some commercial
services but as I can see it is well hidden on the site and I don't think anyone is making a living out of that.
Majordomo is one of the oldest mailing list software.
It even has its own Wikipedia entry.
Web mail
Cider Webmail is a webmail application written in Catalyst.
Monitoring
Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool.
It can provide graphs of any kind of data such as CPU load or "number of new users registered" in the last 5 minutes,
last day or last week.
Opsview provides network and application monitoring of large, complex and distributed
enterprises. It is developed by the company of the same name. If I am not mistaken the
core is open source, but they also have Pro and enterprise versions.
OpenSMART provides monitoring and reporting of large data center
installations. It's focus is mainly on monitoring and reporting data about applications and middleware.
Log analyzer
Octopussy.pm is a Perl/XML Logs Analyzer, Alerter and Reporter.
Squid log analyzer
and mirmon to monitor the status of mirrors.
W3Perl is logfile analyzer for Web / FTP / Squid / CUPS / DHCP and Mail servers.
Yaala is an analyzer for all kinds of logfiles. As I can see there has been no major activity on the mailing list
at all.
Logwatch is a customizable log analysis system. Logwatch parses
through your system's logs and creates a report analyzing areas that
you specify. Logwatch is easy to use and will work right out of the
package on most systems.
SEC - simple event correlator to correlate events during a log file
analysis.
Games
Frozen-Bubble is one of the most well known Perl products,
even though most people don't know that it is written in Perl using the Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL).
Lacuna Expanse is the Massively Multi-player Online Space Strategy Game
developed by Plain Black. The source code can be found on
GitHub. The web site of the game, and the game itself, are awesome.
Very addictive!
Desktop Applications
The Shutter Project has one of best looking web sites among the ones
listed here. This might not be surprising as Shutter is a screen-shot tool.
Enterprise applications
Koha is a software application for library management developed and supported by the Koha Community.
There are several companies support Koha.
One of them is called LibLime.
Apparently this company actually has a fork of Koha and there is a tension between this company and the rest of the Koha community. I am still trying to figure out what's going on there.
Evergreen Open ILS is a software for libraries that helps library patrons find library materials, and helps libraries manage, catalog, and circulate those materials.
Ledger SMB and Open Source ERP: accounting, CRM and more.
LedgerSMB is an acronym for Ledger Small Medium Business, often abbreviated as LSMB.
EplSite ETL is a tool to do easy
the data migrations, doing extraction, transformation, validation and load in a very fast way.
Dezi is an HTTP-based search platform capable of indexing multiple document formats
(HTML, XML, PDF, DOC, XLS, etc) and returning faceted results in a variety of formats (XML, JSON).
It is also available on CPAN.
E-commerce
Interchange CMS is a customizable content management system (CMS)
with transaction management capability. There is a list of companies providing commercial support for Interchange.
SurfShop - web store system - shopping cart.
AgoraCart, is an ecommerce shopping cart software installable via cPanel and
other web hosting control panels.
Tools for Sysadmins
SpamAssassin is the well known SPAM filter software. It is part of
the Apache Software Foundation. This is just one of the many projects,
unrelated to the web server, that are managed by the ASF.
Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. It has several
plugins, some of those are dual-licensed. One is an open source license the other one includes some commercial extension.
The company around it is called Virtualmin.
Lemon LDAP-ng is a web access system providing AAA protection.
(Authentication Authorization Accounting) (I have to admit I am not sure what does that mean.) This is the other web
site that would be the winner for being beautiful.
Backup PC is, not surprisingly a backup system for Linux, Windows, and
Mac. Unfortunately it has not seen any activity in the last year or so.
Wikipedia.
Amavis is a high-performance interface between mailer (MTA) and content checkers: virus scanners, and/or SpamAssassin.
Wikipedia.
POPFile is an Automatic Email Classification system to sort e-mails and fight spam.
web-sorrow a versatile security scanner for the information disclosure and fingerprinting phases of pentesting.
Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP) is a platform-independent transparent SMTP proxy server. Wikipedia. (The assp.sourceforge.net link was redirecting.)
plainvm to control multiple Virual Machines which are distributed among many hosts through your browser.
Ashafix is a Postfixadmin clone in Perl using the Mojolicious framework.
Torrus The Data Series Processing Framework.
NetDisco Network Management Tool.
MRTG - The Multi Router Traffic Grapher for traffic monitoring.
SmokePing for keeping track of your network latency.
Fusion Inventory helps you keep an inventory of computers in your
system. Commercial support is provided by a number of companies, all of them in France. The source code is available
on CPAN as well.
Tools for developers
Tinderbox is a tool to help continuous integration
by running build on several machines. For a long time it was developed and maintained by Mozilla, but if I am not
mistaken it is now handled elsewhere. It does not seem to have a "home".
There is also Gitolite which a git repository management software (access permissions, creating new repositories etc., but e.g. no web interface).
See also Git
e.g. see Git on Gitolite
ack - small grep replacement, especially for programmers.
Tools for Perl Developers
Perl Application Development and Refactoring Environment (Padre) is an Integrated
Development Environment (IDE) written in Perl for Perl developers.
Perlito - a compiler collection that implements a (subset) of Perl 5 and Perl 6.
PSGI/Plack, an interface between Perl web applications and web servers.
Perlbrew is a admin-free perl installation management tool.
Perl Critic is a web service providing source code analyses using
the well known Perl::Critic module. This too is for Perl developers. That's the reason I have not included it in the
table.
DBIx::Class or DBIC is an extensible and flexible Object/Relational Mapper
(ORM).
Perl Dancer, a simple but powerful web application framework.
Mojolicious, a next generation web framework for the Perl programming language.
Some more Perl projects
These projects probably should/could have their own site on their own domain:
Kephra by Herbert Breunung.
Scientific Software
Demeter is a comprehensive system for processing and analyzing X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy data.
Database related Applications
QDepo, a desktop application for retrieving and exporting data from relational database systems to spreadsheet files.
Tpda3 (Tiny Perl Database Application 3) A classic desktop database application framework and run-time.
Sourceforge
Sqitch Simple, command line SQL change management tool written
by David E. Wheeler.
Other
(Still being categorized)
GNU parallel to run jobs in parallel.
MusicBrainz is an open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public.
It is backed by a non-profit organization of the same name. They provide both server and client applications. The server
side is written in Perl.
Natural Docs is a documentation generator for multiple programming languages.
Slic3r is a multi-platform self-executable desktop application which manipulates 3D meshes with several
geometric algorithms to produce G-code instructions for 3D printers. It's got an active forum and an IRC channel on FreeNode with 80 people in it. The project is almost a one-man work but is sponsored/funded
by several businesses and tens of donations.
Proxmox Virtual Environment is an Open Source Server Virtualization Platform,
uses perl for the server side part.
Helios a system for building asynchronous distributed job processing
applications.
DJabberd is a Jabber/XMPP server also
available from CPAN.
GCstar is an application for managing your collections written in GTK2 and Perl.
Act - A Conference Toolkit is a web application to handle conferences.
AFAIK currently it used by YAPCs and Perl Workshops only.
Oracletool A web based tool for Oracle DBA's.
pDLNA Media Server is an UPnP and DLNA service which serves multimedia content to compatible clients.
Zentyal is a Small Business Linux server built and supported by the company with the same name: Zentyal.
TTYtter is a command line Twitter client.
F*EX Frams' Fast File EXchange. Web-based sending of files
of ANY size to ANY recipient.
fstools - Frams' Shell Tools a bunch of small command line
utilities.
(R)?ex manages all your boxes from a central point through the complete process of configuration management and software deployment.
QVD, a VDI platform for Linux.
App::Asciio allows you to draw ASCII diagrams in a modern, but simple graphical application.
Logitech Squeezebox Server, a streaming server for Logitech Squeezebox line of Internet radios supporting both its own SLIM protocol and DLNA.
Wikipedia
Eekboek - an accounting software for The Netherlands.
xCAT Perl base Extreme Cloud Administration from IBM
ELSA Enterprise log search and archive (ELSA) is an industrial-strength solution for centralized log management.
Packet Fence is a fully supported, trusted, Free and Open Source network
access control (NAC) solution.
Smolder for collecting test results in TAP format.
LXR to cross reference the source code of any project.
Publican a single source publishing tool based on DocBook XML.
remOcular, provides a AJAX web interface to Unix command line tools like traceroute, top, mpstat.
DbToRia a Database to Rich Internet Application.
Freeside open-source billing, CRM, trouble ticketing, network monitoring
and provisioning automation software for ISPs and WISPs, VoIP providers.
glNetViz is a tool for visualizing computer network topologies with WebGL.
Questhub is a public and social task manager written by
Vyacheslav Matyukhin.
It is using Perl Dancer.
Source code is on GitHub
App::TimeTracker time tracking for impatient and lazy command line lovers
mt-aws is a multi-threaded synchronization tool from Linux to the
Amazon Glacier, a low-cost storage system.
Circos tools for visualizing data, used in particular in the biological scientific
community.
KJabberd is a Jabber server.
st - simple statistics from the command line interface (CLI).
Rex a DevOps tool not unlike Puppet or Chef in other languages.
Project Builder is a tool for simplifying the process of building packages for multiple operating systems from source.
gRSShopper a personal web environment.
fixmystreet mySociety's popular street problem reporting platform. Home of FixMyStreet.
XMLTV is a set of programs to process TV (tvguide) listings and
manage your TV viewing, storing listings in an XML format. There are
backends to download TV listings for several countries, filter
programs and Perl libraries to process listings.
GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager.
SmoothWall Express firewall solution uses Perl as its web interface.
Logitech Media Server for use with their Squeezeboxes.
pgBadger a fast PostgreSQL log analyzer.
ikiwiki is a wiki compiler.
Shorewall is a gateway/firewall configuration tool for GNU/Linux.
Asternic, a flash operations panel for asterisk. which the server side is Perl and the client is Flash.
Wrangler, a desktop file manager with sophisticated metadata handling capabilities.
Not Open Source
There are a number of non-open source Perl-based products. I am going to create a separate list of those too, for now let me list them here:
Radiator is a RADIUS server
Live Journal a shared blogging community system.
Comments
Thanks for putting this list together Gabor. We need more advocacy of what great software has been written in Perl so we can support it and build a more cohesive community.
If you do any work on the command line, then you really need to install ack. I just found it myself a few weeks ago and it's a fantastic search tool. Not only is it fast, it returns the results in a highly readable format and allows you to customize it however you like. I hadn't heard about it before, so I think this is a real gem that needs to be promoted more.
Useful list there Gabor!
Not open source, but another Perl application to add to your separate list is MIDAS (a room booking system) https://mid.as/
Published on 2014-01-31
If you have any comments or questions, feel free to post them on the source of this page in GitHub. Source on GitHub.
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