open spirit
The open source community develops software with the generous ambition to prevent humanity from being dominated by computers and those who know how to program them. Most of the time they do it for free and the result is a number of clean (low CPU demanding) and stable (bugs are rare) softwares. Here is the opportunity for me to say "thank you" and to give a little advertising.
You will find in the following a list of Free programs that can be used instead of the expensive and obsur commercial softwares. More than just free in the economical sense they are free in their conception, goals and spirit. Feel free to use them and encourage programmers.
Open source tool kit
Office and Web | Open Office | Excellent office suite that can replace Bill's Word, Excel, and PPT. |
| Firefox and Thunderbird | The best web browser and the best mail client. Very good security and spam mail management. |
| Clamwin | An antivirus as good as Norton (daily updates). |
| Bluefish | very good HTML editor. |
| NVU | Graphical html editor. |
Multimedia
| Gimp | Excellent Photoshop like software. |
| Scribus | Very nice vectorial drawing software like Xpress. |
| Blender | 3D animation better than 3D studio? |
| VLC | Probably the best nultimedia player (audio-video). It is French! |
Science
| Scilab | French numerical calculation soft to replace Mathlab. |
| Octave | Also a Mathlab clone. |
| Maxima | Symbolic calculations like Mapple or Mathematica. |
| Wxmaxima | The graphical interface for Maxima. |
| Open Cascade | 3D modélisation software. Mecanical strain and so on... |
| Qcad | A serious challenger to Autocad. |
Operating system
| Ubuntu | A very easy Lunix distribution (very few line codes requested). That's the one I used with succes to stop my Winaddiction! |
Well that is probably enough to keep you busy for hours. If you have any suggestion of interesting softwareplease do not hesitate to contact me.