Have you ever heard “Technology brings us closer”? I know I have, and I know its true. Specifically, I think programmers are at forefront when it comes to sharing and connecting. In what other profession is there hundreds and hundreds of hours of work put in to make something really useful for people that you don’t even know and do it for FREE; and not only do it for free, but make your work available to the public so they can see how you exactly did what you did.
This friends is the world of open source. The reason I love open source is, first of all – everything is free! It also keeps us variety and the power to chose not to be confined to large software enterprises that at times seems to be sucking out our wallets from our back pockets.
Open source software is the only field where FREE is actually fascinating, fantastic, fabulous and fun and not just free. Some of the open source and freeware software is actually 5 to 10 or even more times better than software that you actually pay for. Here are some of the software that I use and absolutely LOVE:
- Linux РSpecifically Ubuntu desktop. I just love this OS. Some people might find it a bit surprising, but given a little more time to mature I may even be able to trade in my mac book pro for an ubuntu notebook! Let me add a little note here, Ubuntu is actually the Linux OS, the user interface is from the GNOME project. Whats really amazing about any linux distros is that you can easily change the interface to something feels right for you. There are other distros that I should mention here – Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian etc.. But I like ubuntu, especially the desktop because it just works. I used fedora in 2006 and it was a pain in the rear.
- Eclipse – according to me this is THE best IDE to use. There is a flavour for everything that you want to do. I use the PHP Development Tools (PDT) and it makes my work less work and more fun. I also use the free aptana plugin from time to time for web development.
- Mozilla Apps – Mozilla offers such amazing apps its hard not to talk about them. Firefox is by far the best web browser out there, thunderbird is a fantastic email client – few years back I tried to like this email client but I couldn’t and instead opted for MS Outlook. Now 2 months back (July 09) I stumbled onto thunderbird again and wow does it impress me. I got so impressed I switched from Outlook. I you are fond of the outlook calendar, look no further, thunderbird has an amazing plugin called ‘lightning’ and its got all your calendar needs. I’m not a big fan of plugins, but this friends is an Ah-mazing plugin – it actually feels like a native feature of thunderbird.
- Apache – Apache is by far the number one http web server out there, and I highly doubt that this will ever change!
- Mootools – is a javascript framework that I use and that I think is really convenient. I don’t know if this is the best one out there because honestly I have not used any other. There are actually many out there. Yahoo even has one out there and has large library with tonnes for features.
- AVG Free – although not open source, it is actually free and I think gets the job done. An excellent (and free) substitute for Norton – oh how I hate norton.
- Zonealarm – again this is not open source, but is actually free. It had a few problems with some of their intermedia releases, but now they are back on track.
- Gimp – I love this. Its not as user friendly has photo shop(but then I don’t find photoshop that user friend to begin with. But being fair, I’m really a beginner at using advanced image editing software anyway), but its free and it does the job exceptionally well.
- OpenOffice – this is THE best substitute for MS Office. This is an excellent package. After all it does everything that MS Office does and more; you can convert your word files into pdfs – thats one feature that first caught my attention. I use MS office on windows since I already had it, but I use OpenOffice on my macbook, since I didn’t want to pay the extra. You don’t need to be worried about your friends, co-workers or your boss not being able to open your openoffice files because you can save those files in MS Office formats.
- Filezilla (ftp client)– an ftp client and server. Can’t say anything more about this. I think this one just rocks. If you are using anything other than this for your ftp needs, you should slap yourself haha.
There may be more that I’m using that I’m missing out there. I’ll update the list later. If you have any questions, you can contact me or leave a comment.