Open Source or Free Alternatives for Paid Software, Part I
October 5th, 2009 by Open Source or Free Alternatives for Paid Software, Part I
Open source is a way to design, development, and distribute software through source codes, which can make the job of web development so much easier and straightforward, while increasing the quality of work developers produce, because since the code is open it can be modified, corrected, and improved. Some designers and developers have expressed to me that using open sources is essential to quality web development, while others say it is something to use to simplify the job. Either way, open sources do help the web developer save time, stress, and of course money. Here is a list of open sources and free alternatives for paid software for you to use in your web design and development work, though this first part is more oriented towards designers. I plan to do a part two that will have more development and programming based stuff. Remember, this list is not a best of or all inclusive, just ones that I have found to be helpful! Hope you find them useful! Feel free to leave your own links, or pass this along! Enjoy!
Graphic Design and Desktop Publishing Alternatives
Paint.Net
Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.
GIMP
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring.
It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
Scribus
Scribus is an Open Source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4/eComStation and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, Spot Colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
Inkscape
An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.
KToon
KToon is a 2D Animation Toolkit for the cartoons creation thought up by animators (Toonka Films (http://www.toonka.com)) for animators. Thanks to GPL license (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html), the KToon`s source code is available in this site for all the developers interested in enrich this project and become it an alternative as professional as the commercial options for animation that exist at the present.
Pencil
Pencil is an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source.
Skencil
Skencil is a Free Software interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes.
A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.
Potrace
Potrace(TM) is a utility for tracing a bitmap, which means, transforming a bitmap into a smooth, scalable image. The input is a bitmap (PBM, PGM, PPM, or BMP format), and the default output is an encapsulated PostScript file (EPS). A typical use is to create EPS files from scanned data, such as company or university logos, handwritten notes, etc. The resulting image is not “jaggy” like a bitmap, but smooth. It can then be rendered at any resolution.
Wings 3D
Wings 3D is a subdivision modeler inspired by Nendo and Mirai from Izware.
Ogre
Since 2001, OGRE has grown to become one of the most popular open-source graphics rendering engines, and has been used in a large number of production projects, in such diverse areas as games, simulators, educational software, interactive art, scientific visualisation, and others. You can read what other people have said about it, and it’s free, so why not try it out?
Blender
Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
Office Alternatives
Koffice
KOffice is an integrated office suite built on the KDE platform. It utilizes free and open standards like OpenDocument for its document formats, component communication and component embedding.
Kexi Project
Kexi is a Free/Libre and Open-Source integrated data management application, a long awaited Open Source competitor for products like Microsoft Access. Kexi can be used for creating database schemas, inserting data, performing queries, and processing data. Forms can be created to provide a custom interface to your data.
NeoOffice
NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs) for Mac OS X. We have created an office suite that is adapted to the unique needs of Mac users by taking the features in Sun Microsystems’ OpenOffice.org office suite and adding improvements.
OpenOffice
OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
ConText
ConTEXT is a small, fast and powerful freeware text editor, developed to serve as a secondary tool for software developers.
LyX
LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG).
GnomeOffice
GNOME Office is the premier suite of office productivity applications designed for the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME Office is the premier suite of office productivity applications designed for the GNOME desktop environment. Some of the applications also can run on Windows or Mac OS X. They provide powerful, efficient office productivity capabilities as free (GPL) software.
Dia
Dia is inspired by the commercial Windows program ‘Visio’, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.
Teylor Feliz is a well-known XHTML/CSS/JavaScript enthusiast from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He has more than 10 years experience in the computer programming and development world, including 2 years teaching computer science. He is currently living in Louisiana, where he plans to complete his degree in Computer Science, and begin a Masters in the field.
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some of these web suites lack style and creativity while others like gimp are award winning.
If you’re going to mention conText, you should at least mention Notepad++ as well.
Don’t forget online Office alternatives such as Google and Zoho.
@John
Yes!!!, totally agree, they should ask someone to make better looking websites. Sometimes, people do not even try to download the software because the impression of the design.
@Chirs
Yes Chris thank you! I post the first part more for designers and office alternatives, the second part is going to be development tools alternatives like Aptana, Notepad++, etc.
Thanks for your comments.
One can find a whole list of Open Source Alternatives at http://www.osalt.com/
Please do not use the word “free alternatives”, These are Free and Open Source Software (Free as in Freedom and Free of cost)and they are far Superior then the paid onces.
http://www.doink.com is a free Web 2.0 site that provides vector drawing & animation tools. Clips made in DoInk can be pushed to YouTube, embedded in Facebook, MySpace, blogs, & web sites.
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IBM – Lotus Symphony
Be Free. Work Smart.
Office productivity software that is intuitive, easy to use and provided at no charge.
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home
Always include PSPad! — the best programmer code editor!
http://www.pspad.com/
@Kelly,
Thanks for your addition!
I tend to favour SSuite Office’s free office suites. Their software also don’t need to run on Java or .NET, like so many open source office suites, so it makes their software very small and efficient.
They also have a very innovative website design.
http://www.ssuitesoft.com
@Tracy,
Thanks for the suggestions. I am sure the other viewers will find that very useful! Thanks again!
Great collection of free source code software. Thanks for sharing this awesome collection.
Thanks everyone for the comments! I am so glad you enjoyed the post, and thank you for the additional open sources!
There is no multimedia section
the best software to play multimedia is vlc player, Gom player, jetaudio
photo viewer
picasa3, irfanview,
utilities
winutiliteis, glaryutilities
browsers
firefox, opera, safari, srware(just like chrome but opensource), maxthon
all above softwares are free and available on http://www.download.cnet.com
thank you