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I really dig this, man. It's a good cause and it helps your family realise that they have choices, lots of them. Noticing that alot of people are recommending office productivity suites (which is cool, but you can only recommend Open Office/AbiWord/Gimp so many times =P) or server/high-end programs (very commendable, but...very time-consuming if anything like what I had to do to teach my parents), I wanted to include a list of games I figured might brighten their day.

First off, glTron. GPLed and very very addicting. Great to show off the fact that 3D Gaming and Linux are not mutually exclusive. (I would mention TuxRacer here, but it has been said before)

Secondly I want to go old-school with Nethack. I mean, it's Nethack. If someone in your family thinks they are cool because they can survive a Zerg-rush, let them play this and see how tough they are. ;)

Thirdly I would mention anything old by Id. They have a ton of free mods and maps for Quake or Quake II and with the new Tenebrae mod it's not your Mom's old Quake. Plus if you compile it for their PC on their PC, it might get them interested in Programming.

Which brings me to my last addition, Dev-C++. For the Casual Programmer (i.e. takes a few courses, kinda C-curious) This is the perfect IDE. Based on GCC it has a good-looking front-end, great support, and takes up ALOT less space than Visual Studio. I know at least one teacher that recommends the students run this, and rightly so. It really puts the brain-strain on the appropriate part of programming, the actual program.

It's not clear what kinds of areas you are working on, so its not easy to recommend a tool.

Personally, I use C/C++ for general purpose apps. Nevertheless, for text/scripts Perl is hard to beat, for objects/GUIs Python is amazing, and Haskell wipes the floor with all the other languages on numerical/functional work. (OK, I admit, I have no life).

In terms of tools,

DevC++and Cygwin, work well for C/C++ development, and together form a nice little set of tools.

Perl can be found at CPANwhich has links to various interpreters and IDEs. It is a language of crazed brilliance, and is wonderfully cross-platform.

Python is really great, comes with a very well-thought-out IDE (IDLE) and a very familiar syntax. It has standard modules which will link it to C++ and Windows.

And finally, Haskell is at Haskell.org, and offers Hugs, which is probably the most advanced open-source IDE available for any language.

With so many wondrous open source tools available, I feel pretty bad about saying this, but your best bet in a corporate environment might actually be Java. It's boring, it's a little slow, its overhyped. In short, it is the Devil and whenever I have used it, I have wanted to kill myself and my neighbours. Still, its free, popular and backed by a big old corporation, its very similar to C++ and you won't get fired for choosing it. Best go with Java.

Mingw32 and (if you like IDEs) Dev-C++ (devcpp comes with mingw32) will create native win32 programs/dlls that directly use the msvcrt dll.

• Dev-C++.
  
• Borland 5.5 (free command line version) + Emacs or V IDE

Dev-C++ is a nice packaging of MingW with a workable IDE. It's not exactly the best IDE I've ever used (IMHO it's a little shabby compared to the later Borland IDEs), but it's good enough for beginning programmers to cut their teeth on before they move to a Real Editor like vim or Emacs. Plus it's Free (as in speech) and free (as in beer), which is nice for an educational environment.

There is little open source software for windows, because authors of open source software do not want to support microsoft.

Sorry, this is false. I run Windows 2000, primarily because this is the sole machine that both my girlfriend and I use, and she is not comfortable with Linux desktop environments. OSS I have installed right now? Putty, GNU Emacs, bash(under Cygwin), BitchX, and an IDE based on mingw32 that utilizes ports of gcc and gdb.

I have run the Gimp on Windows, but that's actually kind of jarring; GTK look and feel just smacked down in the middle of everything else. I probably would have gotten used to it eventually, though.