CibbuanoOutstanding Open Source Apps
November 5th 2008 01:53
With the economy in a shocking tailspin, some pundits are looking forward to the failure of open source software... open source was a movement that revitalized the idea of a software community, offering surprisingly robust applications with decent security.
Yes - the open source movement basically came up to the Microsoft wall, and threatened to outperform the software giant. Microsoft originally scoffed at the idea of a bunch of bespectacled Linux geeks getting together and trying to cobble together some software.
Then Firefox came out and slapped Microsoft with a free palm. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it was a massive improvement over Internet Explorer, which had stayed static for years.
Firefox gave us options and control - best of all, people were free to modify and look at the source code... at this moment, I'm writing on Swiftfox, a modified version of Firefox, tailored for my CPU.
Microsoft fought back with a "Hey guys! Me too, right?" attitude, but it marked the beginning of the stink of Microsoft. Stuffy and unfashionable, slow to change, domineering and totalitarian.
Open source gave me fantastic tools that I felt good about using. Previously, it was common practice for University students to pirate all the software we needed. Shady, yes, but that was the only way we could learn those skills. The open source alternatives, especially the freeware apps, allowed me to do the same functions, but without the guilt.
Daily Artisan has a list of 7 well-known open source products that have really made the community sit up and take notice.
The list is a little predictable:
Firefox, Amarok, OpenOffice, Gabber, Apache, Wordpress, and VLC.
I'd add more to this list, since I use some specialized software for my work: Kile is a fantastic frontend for LaTeX, allowing me to create professional-looking documents with a minimum of effort. Octave is a freeware MatLAB clone that, while it's not as good as MatLAB, allows users to do complex numerical analysis with almost the same functionality.
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