Open Source Goody Bag : More Freebies

“Free software is a matter of liberty, not price.
To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech’ not as in ‘free beer.’”

-Richard Stallman. Founder of the Free Software Movement.

Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s sources. Some consider it as a philosophy, and others consider it as a pragmatic methodology. No matter which side you take, there’s no denying the good that has come from this movement.

Here are 3 pieces of open source software which I have grown to love.

GimpShop

Free image editing software
Great for : Making those fine touches on your photos
Open-source alternative to: Photoshop

The beef: When the original Gimp editor came out on the scene, it’s user interface was an utter nightmare. Enter Gimpshop, the user interface add-on which got Gimpshop to function like Photoshop, and made it accesible to the masses. In true open source style, a great idea was improved on, shared with the world – and everyone reaped the benefits.

A point to remember, this is NOT an image creation tool — it is an image manipulation tool. Don’t try to figure out how to draw something here.

Notepad ++

Free text editing software
Great for : quick coding
Open-source alternative to: Notepad or any commercial HTML editor

The beef: Notepad++ has ability to recognise programming languages, and among other things, makes it easier to read by color coding, creating hierarchical modules on the fly. This is a how I do all my HTML and PHP editing now, and it has made my site template editing a much easier process.

7-zip

Free file compression tool
Great for : Working with Zip files
Open-source alternative to: Winzip or WinRAR

The beef: This does everything I need in terms of compression, and it also claims to be more effecient than WinZip and other paid services. Has all the basic funcationality like password encryption, ability to split archives into multiple files, and best of all supports the following:

Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS

Final note: If you liked this list, you may enjoy this one as well.