What is Open Source?

Open source software is free software developed by a collective of people working for no other reason than to further technology and provide something of value to the public. Their full agendas may vary, but this is one case where the something for free will not cost you a dime. You can even help in further development of the programs if you want to.

Open source programs compete with programs like Microsoft Office, Norton Anti-virus, Photoshop, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and lots more. Often times the open source programs work even better than ones that cost hundreds of dollars! Below is a list of my favorite open source software and other free software that you might find useful.

Free Anti-Virus

Here’s a shocker! Some free anti-virus programs have been shown to outperform the ones you pay for. An Australian company ran some benchmark tests on quite a few major software programs. Both Avast and Avira came out ranking as good as or better than top tier anti-virus programs like Norton. More information can be found here and links to the download pages are below.

	Avast
	Avira

 

Free Word Processing Suite

Why pay hundreds for the Microsoft Office Suite? Unless you get the student deal where you can get the whole thing for about $60, then I highly recommend trying out Open Office from Sun Microsystems. It is compatible with Microsoft Documents and Excel. If they sold the Open Office Suite it would easily go for a couple hundred bucks. Give it a try.

Open Office

 

Free Photo Editors

GetPaint is a great graphics/photo editor for it’s ease of use and has won several big awards from the software community.

Gimp is much more technical and can allow for some serious graphics editing. Although it is difficult to use, there are plenty of online tutorials available for this open source program.

	Gimp
	Get Paint

 

Free Clip Art

Finally! It’s free clip art without spam and clicking through multiple pages just to download an image. The Open Clip Art Library is free for personal and business use. All the images are licensed under the Creative Commons license and they can be edited or altered to you specifications.

You can search for specific images online with keywords or download the directory to your computer. Then you can just use your search tool in the file manager. Most of images you will find on The Deal Review come from the Open Clip Art Library. Why pay for images when there are thousands of free ones here?

Open Clip Art Library

 

Free Web-Browsers

Mozilla is setting the standard for open source web-browsing with hundreds of plugins to enhance your browsing experience.

Google Chrome is way faster than any browser you have used before, but lacks many of the great plugins you will find with Firefox. I image this will not be the case for long.

	Fire Fox
	Google Chrome

 

Free Video Player/Editor

Miro is truly an amazing high definition video player. It is compatible with just about any video format and beats Windows Media Player any day.

Miro

 

Free E-mail Client

Manage all your e-mail from one place with something other than Outlook. Mozilla Thunderbird is your open source solution and has tons of add-ons just like Firefox.

Mozilla Thunderbird

 

Free Personal Finance Tools

If there is one thing that you can do to get your finances in order, it’s consolidating all the info at Mint.com. Mint will organize information from all of you online accounts in one place. Brokerages accounts, auto loans, bank accounts, mortgages, and credit cards can all be tracked in real time!

If you need to manage your business accounting and cringe at purchasing programs like Quicken and such then all you have to do is download a free copy of Turbo Cash. If you are paying more than $1 for you accounting software then you are paying too much!

	Mint
	Turbo Cash