Showing posts with label Open Source. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Open Source. Show all posts

2014-06-03

Save Money with Open Source Software

Open source software.

You're almost certainly using some of it right now!  Most of the visitors to the site browse here using Firefox, an open source project of the Mozilla Foundation; the second runner up is Google Chrome, which is just the Google-branded version of the Chromium browser open source project.
Other open source projects you may have heard of:

GNU/Linux (operating systems)
Wordpress (blogging tool)
Thunderbird (email client)
Blender (3D graphics)
VLC (media player)
FileZilla (FTP client)
Adium (chat client)
Pidgin (chat client)
Audacity (digital audio editor)
FrostWire (P2P filesharing)
OpenOffice/LibreOffice (office productivity suite)
MediaWiki (wiki software that runs Wikipedia)
phpBB (internet bulletin board)
GIMP (graphics editor)
Notepad++ (text editor)
HandBrake (media transcoder)
Calibre (ebook manager)
LaTeX (document preparation system)
Sage Math (computer algebra system)

...and the list goes on.

Even if you don't think you have any installed, most of the computers that host webpages are running the Apache HTTP Server, an open source project.  Proprietary software also reuses chunks of open-source software to accomplish common software tasks without having to write everything from scratch.  And that's one of the greatest things about the open software movement: it creates a huge bank of code that anyone is free to draw from, study, and incorporate into their own projects—once something is 'done right', the product is available to everyone, for free, forever.  This is in contrast to many proprietary software projects, where corporate policy is to patent every feature and algorithm to keep anyone else from using it for 17 years.

2013-04-05

History Lesson: Open Source Office Software

There are many open source office productivity suites to choose from, though several of these options are actually forks of one another.  To add to the confusion, the crowd favorite suite was recently deposed and a number of projects were discontinued and re-merged.  Untangle the mess with a bit of history!
  1. OpenOffice is (was, briefly, maybe?) dead; long live LibreOffice
  2. If you use Linux, install LibreOffice
  3. If you use Windows, install LibreOffice
  4. If you use MacOS, try LibreOffice and NeoOffice
LibreOffice recently released v4 - even if your Linux distribution shipped with v3, check it out at libreoffice.org!