Free Guerilla Software!

Depending on how much of a geek you are, you might have heard a little or a lot about the Open Source movement. It's the guerrilla approach to developing software. And increasingly, it's bringing us products which are kicking some serious arse in competition with the big boys. Best of all, they're almost always free.

Normally companies guard the source code of their software products jealously. They spend big money developing them, and it's only natural they don't want anyone taking a sneaky peek. The trouble with that is that it sucks for the little guy. The corporate bean-counters have you by the cojones. The final say on what your computer is and does lies not with you, but with dull-spirited business drones. And by extension that means they're trying to gain control on how we use the lovely internet.

Open source is different, it allows anybody who cares enough to see and tinker with the nuts and bolts of the software. Development and testing is often done by a widespread community of dedicated bedroom-mounted geek units, instead of a corporate code-farm. While this may seem haphazard, the reality is that a hard-core of highly-skilled zealots (often working for free) can often produce a better product, and in particular can produce updates, security fixes and specialised versions of their software faster than the corporate behemoths, while the community approach can speed up the bug-spotting and fixing process.

But most importantly of all to us little people, open-source software is not designed to suit the agenda of some heartless global empire. No spyware, no adware. Flexible software that doesn't try to force you to do things according to somebody else's agenda. Computers and the internet are supposed to makes us free, not shackle us to big business.

But enough philosophical flimflam. I hear your cry: what can it do for me? Well, here's a selection of open source software for Windows. It all rocks big time, and is all free.

(Btw, for open source stuff for Macs, look here.)

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Web Browsing:

IM - Instant Messaging:

Email:

Word Processing / Office Suites:

RSS:

Internet TV / Video Podcasting:

Peer-to-Peer Filesharing:

Video Playback:

DVD Ripping / Video Conversion:

Podcasting:

DVD Ripping:

Sound Recording:

Graphics / Photo Editing:

FTP / SFTP:

IRC:

Developer tools:

Note Taking:

Personal Finance:

Screensaver:

3D Graphics and Modeling:

Also see: Persistence of Vision Raytracer, Quesa

Stars and Outer Space:

Also see: macORSA - Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation, and Analysis

Games:

Also see: Snes9X (SNES emulator), Frozen Bubble

Free File Hosting:

Security Tools:

MP3 and Audio Tools:

Mapping Tools:

List courtesy of those helpful dudes at http://www.opensourcewindows.org/

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