"We create the future, with our words, our deeds and with our beliefs"
- Lady Ladira, B5: "Signs and Portents"
«Open Source Software», what's this?!
It's software with given access to its source code. You can modify or reuse the code as you wish. One of the goals of Open Source Software is to share a software with everybody and hope other citizens will help improve the code, provide new features, fix a few bugs and thus offer a better product! With the source code in your hands, any software developper can himself rebuild the software, Open Source software is then free.
Drawbacks? Yup. Some Open Source softwares are hard to install or use, or even without documentation for the common user! But there are exceptions: I am one of those who believes in the Open Source movement, it's an utopic software future. Transparency, freeness, efficiency.
THE CRITICAL MASS: think about your favourite software free and
updated by a few good citizens; why purchase costly software if you can
have a better one for free?! The more people using Open Source
Software, the more people to know about and support the Open Source
Software movement, the better Open Source Software will be!
A free Office apps suite similar and compatible to Microsoft Office.
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Another Dream-software. It's a free and open source Adobe Photoshop! GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. It is used to create, modify, convert any kind of pictures. Download that one!
Mozilla is the biggest free & Open Source internet browser project. Mozilla offers a lot more (email client, calendar, webpage composer, etc)!
Linux is a free & Open Source operating system that fits the communitarian utopia: people working together to build a better product! Linux keeps the flaw of being less user-friendly than the MacOS but Linux is improving at an incredible pace!
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Ok - that software is not for everyone! GRASS GIS (Geographic
Resources Analysis Support System) is a Geographical Information System
(GIS) with raster, topological vector, image processing, and graphics
production. It is open source and is released under the GNU GPL
(General Public License). It's compatible with many types of data found
in the GIS industry. Has Unix/Linux and MacOS X
ports. Working in geomatics? You must visit those sites: www.freegis.org and www.remotesensing.org in
teledetection both offers open source software. Here's a small article introducing GRASS, in french.
FIND MORE HERE.
These softwares use your processor while you don't ! It's another way to wisely use your computer hardware resources for the sake of us all! : ) If you cannot shutoff your computer and there's no way anyone else can benefit from it, than these pieces of software are for you:
Directory websites for ditributed-projects: On google - Aspenleaf
Last update: December 7th, 2004
NOTE:
About the GNU license:
The GNU license forces an Open Source Software to remain free and
non-commerciable. Here's some quotes from the reference book on the GNU
license: «the GNU General Public License is intended to
guarantee your freedom to share and change free software»
«We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free
program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the
program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any
patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.»
«To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that
forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the
rights.» «the GNU General Public License (GPL),
which requires licensed software to be freely redistributable, and has
a "viral" clause requiring that derivative works also be licensed under
the GPL, and thus freely available and modifiable.»