Free and Open Source Software that Everyone Should Try

The Internet is a very, very large place with thousands of software applications written for many different purposes. As a result, finding good software can be difficult. This list is here to show you the absolute best in many different areas.

Why go Free and Open Source? First, because free is always better ;). Open Source is important because it allows you to truly own a copy of the software. When you buy an appliance from the store, for example a toaster, you can whatever you want with it. You can sell it, take it apart, make crazy contraptions with it... anything, really. You bought it. It's yours.

But when you buy software from companies like Adobe or Microsoft, and you accept the End User License Agreement during installation, you have no rights to modify the software or use the software in any way that they don't want you to. In other words, you don't truly own the copy you paid for; they own your copy. Free and Open Source software can be used for any purpose.

Video Playing:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
VLC is the best video player I have ever used. It can play almost any video and audio format out of the box, so no need to go searching for and installing useless codecs that you'll only need once. VLC also supports streaming over several protocols (it supports IPv4 and IPv6), and it's highly portable and cross-platform.

Music Playing:
http://www.getsongbird.com/
iTunes is fine and all... but Songbird is better, mainly because of its customizability. It has a customizable user interface, and currently has support for hundreds of addons, which do everything from searching the Internet for lyrics to your music, syncing songs to your iPod, deleting broken tracks in your library, and much, much more. I also find that it runs faster than iTunes.

Internet Browsing:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/
If you're not already using Firefox, you're crazy. It's secure, fast, and feature rich. Firefox has support for thousands of addons, supports all the Internet standards, and is used by hundreds of millions of people (1).

PDF Viewing:
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html
Adobe Reader is free, true... but it's not open source, it slows down your computer, and Adobe's update manager is horrible. SumatraPDF is a minimalistic, portable PDF viewer that loads quickly, and runs fast. It doesn't have very many features, but it has all the important ones.

Instant Messaging:
http://www.pidgin.im/
Pidgin is an Instant Messenger client that communicates over multiple protocols. What this means in English is that you can log onto your AIM, MSN, Google Talk, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo, and many more with this one program and chat. And, as with Songbird and Firefox, Pidgin supports plugins (though not as many).

Word Processing:
http://www.openoffice.org/
Open Office is a software suite created by Sun Microsystems to be an open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Open Office is compatible with Microsoft Office and available in many languages. It comes with a word processor, a spreadsheet creator, a vector graphics illustrator and more. There have been over 50 million downloads since version 3.0 was released (2).

If you're looking for a free and Open Source alternative to a commercial software you are currently using, I highly recommend the site http://www.osalt.com/.

1. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/12/mozilla-coo-over-125-million-people-use-firefox.ars
2. http://www.openoffice.org/