Greatest Open Source and Free Software

Quite often people hear or use software that is free of charge (freeware). Here I want to present great software that is additionally Open Source. This additional requirement is important to me as I like to have insight in the software and be able to use parts of it for own purposes. Some people think that software that costs nothing is also not worth anything. I hope I can contribute to a change in these minds.

Computer graphics

Gimp, http://www.gimp.org

Gimp is a raster image editor. It supports a large set of formats and has many professional functions to process images. Gimp is a bit tedious to learn at first. But once you got the basics, it is really great. The desktop publishing or color management is not so good yet but is on a good track. What I like is its plug-in and scripting extensibility. This is a tool that satisfies all needs for private sakes. If you want to work with color calibrated devices and have hard requirements regarding CMS then you'll have to invest money and get a commercial application. The Little CMS component is however sufficient for printers and monitors on the end-user market.

Blender, http://www.blender.org

Blender is probably one of the most amazing piece of software you can get for free on the market. It was once commercially sold by NaN (Not a Number), a dutch company. This one got into financial trouble. The creditors agreed to license Blender under GPL in exchange of 100.000$. So nearly overnight, a great 3D rendering and modeling software became available as Open Source and free software. Before that time there was no real good free alternative to 3d Studio, now you have Blender!

Scribus, http://www.scribus.net

Scribus is a Desktop Publishing Tool that reaches a high degree of accuracy for printing tasks. I used it to create a photo book of 40 pages (with pictures of south africa during our wedding trip). It was a hard task to learn it, but I could not realize it to my satisfaction with click & place software you get from the cheaper publishers.

Inkscape, http://www.inkscape.org

If you need a tool for vector graphics, give it at least a try. I needed some time to get into efficient workflows to create images, the settings are quite overwhelming.

Povray, http://www.povray.org

Raytracing is what you like, then povray is a powerful raytracer that renders scenes very nicely, with a high degree of physical correctness. However it doesn't come with any decent scene editor, so google for some editors and use it as an engine only.

Internet

Firefox, http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox

Firefox is the greatest browser. Why? Are you kidding! Have a look at the large set of extensions and plug-ins, it is fully skinnable, fast and aims at standard compliance. The acidtests are stress tests to see how well your browser understands and handles CSS. Maybe it is not the fastest (Opera is actually faster) nor the most standard compliant, but it is widely used, fast enough, extensions are easy to manage and is robust.

Thunderbird, http://www.mozillamessaging.com

Thunderbird is an EMail client. It has made incredible improvements since version 3. Searching through a big amount of EMails is now so fast. Configuration is eased with automatic settings for many providers. I must say that I was impressed by the new version in terms of usability and scalability. I kept all Emails I wrote since over 5 years and it runs fairly smooth.

Pidgin, http://pidgin.im

Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on MSN, talking to a friend on Google Talk, and sitting in a Yahoo chat room all at the same time.

Office

Open Office, http://www.openoffice.org

Do I need to present it? Sun made a great work in creating a robust office suite. The interoperability between MS Office products is not working perfectly but at least you can read MS Word and MS Excel files under Linux.

FreeMind, http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki

A good mind mapping tool that fits most needs. It is maybe not yet so feature rich as commercial counterparts, but definitively give it a try.

Utilities

7-zip, http://www.7-zip.org

7-zip handles all usual compression formats and makes it a central tool if you need to handle many different formats.

WireShark, http://www.wireshark.org

Professional network protocol analyzer. Can be used to record data exchange on the network and filter out the results. Definitively a must have if you are developing network tools.

Audacity, http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Great tool to record and edit sound files. It is fast and extensible. It supports a lot of formats and allows to filter or apply effects on sound tracks. Here is a list of features from the audacity wiki: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Current_Features.

Cryptography software

TrueCrypt, http://www.truecrypt.org

You want to encrypt partitions, create virtual volumes or protect you data on USB, then this is an amazingly robust and well designed tool. In this area a vendor lock-in can bring you into an extremely critical situation. Beside this, not a lot of commercial tools work under Linux. Many vendors use the security by obscurity principle with some homebrewed algorithms that are not verified by external independent experts which violates the Kerckhoff's principle. TrueCrypt is now for me a standard tool I liked from the very first day on.

Source code management

Bazaar, http://bazaar-vcs.org

Since I started projects on launchpad, I started using Bazaar as a source code management software. It has all advanced features present in modern VCS like Git and is quite easy to use. What makes the difference between Bazaar and Git is its scalability. With git, when you clone you get a copy of the complete repository. With Bazaar you can choose how deep your local copy is. There is much more to say, just try it out, it is free!

GIT, http://git-scm.com

Distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Every Git clone is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server. Branching and merging are fast and easy to do.

Subversion, http://subversion.apache.org

Centralized version control system widely used now. It has many professional features like merge tracking and is since 2010 living as top level apache project. It you want a distributed version control system built upon subversion, try out mercurial from http://mercurial.selenic.com.