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e.g. Inkscape, which is currently 0.46! (stable version).

It's pretty arbitrary when to go to 1.0, 2.0, etc., I would say.

This is only for whiteboarding (not document sharing), but Inkscape can share a workspace over XMPP (Jabber) protocol. The feature is sometimes called Inkboard.

More info here: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/WhiteBoard and here: http://inkboard.sourceforge.net/

-molo

but: how does one work the kinds of things flash does, without flash?

The technology is all there as part of the HTML 5 spec. (Look it up over on the W3C or at WHATWG.org.) Canvas, Audio, SVG, and Video all provide alternatives to what Flash does. Even the ability to keep track of complex state information exists in HTML 5. And the API is significantly improved over the simple SharedObjects Flash offers.

Does environment (x) have the UI so that people can get their work done quickly and easily?

That's a problem for the tool creators. HTML 5 is merely the technology. The first company to make a Flash Studio-like tool for HTML 5 will probably make quite a bit of money. In the meantime, individual technologies can be addressed with tools like Inkscape. :-)

Inkscape is currently undergoing a Google Summer of code project to improve it's applicability for blueprints, which is why I mentioned it.

There's no interest in duplicating AutoCAD because it's a massive load of work. Somehow you've taken the idea that people not getting together and duplicating AutoCAD's massive infrastructure and lock-in for ignorance of Engineering principles and design. Autodesk can dig themselves out of the hole they're in; they have Linux experts on hand (to support Maya) to start digging themselves out with. I know tons of places that want Linux in their shop; but none want the first mover disadvantage of funding whatever replaces AutoCAD. They'll probably look at things like QCad with more lenient eyes than yourself.

I understand the need for engineering design tools; spice is a critical analysis tool, and at some point I'd love to see Oregano picked up under GSoC or some other academic project. Fedora has Electronic Lab spin that seems neat. I suppose at the end of the day, open source is written by those who need it can can write it, and EE's write code more often than architects.

Funny, just now I was checking the Roadmap for Inkscape. SVG animation is planned for the next-next release (0.48, it's 0.46 now, 0.47 will be basically some internal re-factoring).

Unfortunately, multi-page support, which was the feature I was looking for, is planned for 0.49 (or 0.50?).

http://www.koffice.org/krita/
http://www.inkscape.org/
http://www.gimpshop.com/
http://www.getpaint.net/

You can even get an Alpha of Krita 2.0 for Windows these days. All of those are free.

If you're more interested in drawing shapes and the like, try Inkscape.

How about some software that you train with scans of your handwriting and it generates a vector font based on your own handwriting. Now that would be cool.

I think it's only possible to edit one page at a time, but with pdftk it shouldn't be much of a limitation.

And chances of infection go from unlikely to zOMG what happened to your tool?? Running executables from shady sources? No wonder you guys have problems with viruses.

If were going to talk about free photoshop, I propose we link to it. And free illustrator, and free indesign.

I'm sure some people can do some nice stuff with this, but what I'd really like to see is decent animated SVG in an open format. Can you imagine what Inkscape would be like with support for animation? Incredible - that's what. If some rich company (Google, Sun) wants to knock FLASH flying and bring about an open standard, that would be the short route to go.

There's already a free alternative well supported on mobile phones... SVG Tiny

What is needed there is a good free Authoring tool. The only one that is worth anything right now is Ikivo Animator... you can see a demo here

InkScape is good for creating SVG artwork but it doesn't have a timeline or scripting support for animations or interactivity.

This is called out on an SVG compliance comment on their wiki

The other authoring tool mentioned there is Beatware but it has disappeared... possibly purchased by another company and all references pulled.

> Frankly, the Community could start charging for this software and my company would gladly pay whatever they asked. These three programs are absolutely invaluable to us.

Feel free to suggest that your company make a donation; I suggest the cost of the equivalent Adobe product.

These are the links I could find :

GIMP : http://www.gimp.org/donating/
Scribus : http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Scribus_Public_Wiki:Site_support
Inkscape : http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Inkscape_Wiki:Site_support

There are several very good options for vector art on linux. You might try Inkscape for one.

You have a point though, professionals need their tools to work on their OS. If we can't have Illustrator or Freehand fully functional under wine, at the very least we need an Illustrator and Freehand to SVG converter for interoperability.

Thanks for recommending Paint.NET. Just tried out out, and it seems a lot easier for Photoshop users to switch to than the GIMP (even GIMPshop). Coupled with Inkscape and Kompozer, I now have a reasonable combination of apps to replace Adobe's Creative Suite (except for Flash).

... But we still have to wait for Inkscape 0.50 (Milestone 16) for our arrowheads to be the same color as the arrow lines. In the mean time, keep your arrows black, please.

...in all its glory.

If you're looking to replace Illustrator, try Inkscape.

If you're looking to replace Framemaker, MadCap is releasing Blaze very soon.

If you're looking to replace Adobe Acrobat Pro, there are about 10 different companies with products on the market.

If you're looking to replace InDesign, you could try Quark (but I'm not sure I'd recommend it).

If you're looking to replace Dreamweaver, there are several comparable editors depending upon your needs and platform

If you're looking to replace Photoshop, you can replace it on the low end with Pixelmator and for automated tasks with GraphicConverter or Gimp. For one off photo touch ups on the very high end, there really isn't a lot of competition yet.

I guess what I'm saying is, there is a competitor for most of their products for most workflows. A big part of the problem is the corporate culture that makes it so easy to get approval to buy Adobe CS suite for $2500, and so hard to get approval to buy a $60 copy of Pixelmator, which will be just as useful, but save the company money... and why should an employee bother to fight for savings for their company when it will give them fewer toys to play with?

I can use the same software on Linux just as easily as I do on my Mac.

What software are you using exactly?

First I should say I got it reversed, instead I should of said I can use the same software on my Macs as I can use in Linux. Now as for what I use, for now I only use Eudora, Firefox, and a text editor on my Mac. When I get around to it though I plan on installing CinePaint and Inkscape, both of which are cross platform. I have X11 installed on my Mac and with either Fink or MacPorts I can download and install the same X11 programs for Linux on my Mac. Fink uses dpkg, dselect and apt-get from the Debian Project and MacPorts uses Redhat's rpm package management software. For technical reasons I haven't used my Linux PC in a few months.

Someone into graphics and photography is not going to be happy with the Linux offerings, no matter how complete, since the apps don't even exist for the platform.

While I agree different Linux distros come with different programs there's not much of a problem with apps for graphics and photography. Sure Adobe hasn't released Photoshop for Linux yet, but it can be installed on Linux systems with WINE or CrossOver. Even if Linux won't install CS3, though it doesn't have everything CS3 does, there's CinePaint, formerly Film GIMP, used in the movie industry. For graphics other than for photography there's Inscape, Xara Extreme, Blender, and other programs that are cross platform. Actually because I want to learn it I picked up a book yesterday on Blender. Now, only if I could find one for CinePaint. And yes, though only an amateur now I hope to break into photography freelance. Because I've only done film and not digital work, I'll probably be working with film a lot at first. But I'll scan film and work digitally, so I'll tryout CinePaint first and then only if it doesn't workout well will I get Photoshop. Then to save money on it I'll get an old version then get the upgrade version.

Ah, it's be good to get back into the darkroom.

IHMO: It didn't mean powerful, he meant simple.

Gimp with http://www.inkscape.org/ matches my basic need.

either that, edit some photos, create some music, even make a nice drawing or perhaps write a book. The fact that the Linux and *BSD excel at IT and programming jobs doesn't mean that's all they're good for, as you'd know had you actually used them.

or you could just troll on Slashdot like you're doing right now, you can use Opera or Firefox perfecly fine for that under Linux, too.

Supply and demand does not change at all because of any version of GPL!

This is patently false, the GPL makes sure anyone anywhere can take GPLed software and distribute it, therefore it does have a direct affect on supply.

Alternatives to a lot of software, which was not available to the general public has been made available by way of FOSS. This has only devaluated software which was inferior to the FOSS alternatives. Example: For all the great features of Gimp, Photoshop is still very successful, and to my knowledge the price tag hasn't gone down because of Gimp.

Yea, as much as I'd love GIMP if it had the capabilities of Photoshop, it doesn't come close for pro photographers. Film Gimp, aka CinePaint is a lot better on that score, and I may try it out. But first I plan on trying out Inkscape. I hope it works, I don't want to layout $800 for PS CS3.

And how long did he think he could get away with it?

Just kidding. Bryce is a fine fellow, and is also the excellent boss of the Inkscape project.

Inkscape doesn't have floating palettes? That's news to me. And it doesn't have a Mac OS X version? Oh, you probably mean a package that doesn't require X. I don't see what the big deal is about supporting native Cocoa widgets anyway. It's not like packages like Photoshop and Illustrator haven't veered away from the system standard widgets for years anyway (those palettes are Adobe's proprietary widgets, not native Mac OS widgets). If it's really that big a deal, then why doesn't someone take the source and write a Cocoa version?

But who would buy it? The same reasons not to buy and run Windows (whatever they are) also apply to Office

The same people who buy CrossOver from CodeWeavers which allows people to run MS Office on both Linux and Mac OSX, or use WINE for the same purpose. Being a commercial port of WINE it runs a bunch of Windows software. It's not needed for Macs but I may get it to run Photoshop on Linux. First I'll tryout FOOS apps like Inkscape, Cinepaint, and others.

Say you develop a photo-editing (or whatever) piece of software and release it under the GPL. Then you add a few new features and decide to start charging money for a closed-source version with more functionality. No problem! That is just fine.

Ok, thanks I didn't know that. What if I were to take another GPL software like Inkscape and add a billing module, could I close source the module?

You see the difference? If it's your code, the GPL doesn't keep you from doing anything you want. The only thing it restricts is what you can do with Joe's code. Joe was nice enough to give you his code for free; why should you be allowed to charge other people for it?

Maybe it wasn't obvious in my previous post but in reverse that's what I was concerned with. Someone else taking my code then selling it, with or without bug fixes and such, without me seeing any money. Afterall why should I program some software if I can't try to make some money? I could be spending my tyme on something else like scuba diving and photography. See, I'm not a nerd sitting in a basement banging out code day in day out. While I don't work because of a disability, I love doing other things such as the aforementioned scuba diving and photograhy.

By all means, continue disliking the GPL (I certainly don't particularly like it). But please do so for the right reasons.

I never said I didn't like the GPL, what I said was I prefered the BSD style licenses. Appearently though, from what you say the GPL does allow me to do at least some of the things for which I prefered the BSD.

If you really wants to be able to sell (software including) his code, you can ask him for special permission to do so.

You don't need "Joe's" permission to sale software with his code do you? I thought the GPL just prevented you from taking his code and closing the source, you had to include the code source if you distributed it. If you can't sale the software then I was ripped off when I paid for RedHat years ago. How do all these companies get away with violating the GPL by selling software?

I just made a quick check and found a download site with 1000 image editors. How many open source applications do you need? There's GIMP and Krita and... honestly, I can't think of a third one.

• POV-Ray
• Blender
• Xara
• Krita
• Inkscape

I've got a few more bookmarked. As for why there are so many, some are meant to do specific things, run in specific environments, or to edit specific formats. Some, like POV-Ray, are vector graphics editors. Some are bitmap editors. Some are 2D and others 3D. Some only run on Y OS in Z like Krita is for KDE. There are a number of reasons there are so many different FOOS image editors.

I wonder if the growing need for OS and client software diversity will finally make hardware manufacturers start to do real multiple OS support and web site designers to finally code to be non-client dependent.

I met one website developer who only used Macs. She ran Windows in a vm so she could test in Windows browsers but that's it. I've heard others are the same.

OpenOffice on Windows

Though I'm using Windows on my desktop now I plan on getting a MBP RSN, and I'll try OO, NeoOffice, or another version of OO. I'm wondering what db to get though. I don't know if it's still true but I heard MySQL doesn't properly handle relations, and I've been thinking of trying PostGres and, or Firebird.

Once you replace the killer app you really open the door to your flavor of linux distro on the PC.

I've got a PC running Linspire Linux which I use as a server or storage right now, but as I say above I want to get a Macbook Pro for a laptop. The killer app(s) for me will be a graphics/photo editor and tools for web development. Photoshop is available for the Mac however before I fork over the money for it I want to try some FOOS apps, like POV-Ray, blender, or Inkscape to see if any of them is a good replacement for PS.

It seems to me that photoshop is just designed to appeal to computer-illeterate designers who just can't be bothered to learn a new medium,

Photoshop is for photographers. And GIMP doesn't approach what many photoraphers need. Hell it doesn't even have 16 bit colour depths whereas PS has 24 and 32 bit colour depth. I'm hoping CinePaint works at these depths, that or inkscape works well with photos. I'm hoping to break into photography as a pro and want to try both before I spring for the cost for PS.

GIMP isn't a photoshop replacement, not for pros. It doesn't even have 16 bit colour depth yet however PS has 24 and 32 bit colour depth. A few months ago another /.er posted a link to another FOOS graphics editor that did support 24 bits though I don't recall what it was. However if you want to use an SVG editor, both GIMP and Photoshop are bitmapped, there's inkscape. How well it works for editing photos though I don't know. It does have CMYK, along with others, support though.

No doubt that I would agree with the parent 100%. GIMP may be acceptable for casual doodler or cropping photos, but it ultimately a complete waste of time for any professional accustomed to a plethora of serious tools and a myriad of features used daily to make a living. We don't even have to discuss its' intolerable user interface because GIMP's graphic capabilities are not even in the same ballpark as Photoshop.

However, one may be able replace some of the other software depending on how you used it. The original poster framed the scenario as tools for the marketing department to use, which clearly lowers the bar in terms of expectations as to what level of competency will be applied. Marketers are not designers, so it would appear as though if Software X does a reasonable job approximating most tasks of Adobe Y, then one can adopt it.

Photoshop - You're unlikely to replace that one. Although, someone else mentioned Pixel which could possibly cut the mustard depending on your needs. Otherwise, there really is nothing to compare to Photoshop.

Illustrator - Definitely have a strong look at Inkscape. I've toyed with it for 2 or 3 years to keep tabs on its' development, after being fairly impressed during my first run through. These days it has continued to advance and I'd suggest it's ready for the professional world. You can create substantially complex pieces with Inkscape which will probably far out-pace the ability of your Marketing department to bother learning in the first place. While it might be missing a pet feature or two, the bottomline is that Inkscape is ready to be taken seriously as a replacement for Illustrator (and, previously, FreeHand).

InDesign - Professionals already use Scribus to handle multipage full color layouts sent directly to commercial print houses, so it's gotta be worth your time to look at. CMYK separation, PDF generation,and much of the toolsets you'd expect to see in Quark or InDesign; certainly more than enough power for your Marketing department.

Acrobat Pro - If you're heavily using features like annotation, collaboration, form creation, et cetera, then you probably won't be replacing Acrobat Professional. Nothing can touch it. However, if all you need is to be able to allow your Marketing droids to generate PDFs from documents they create in other software, then you can slap PDFCreator on their little Windows boxen. Remember that OpenOffice already has the ability to turn any of their normal documents and spreadsheets into a PDF at a click of a button. Surely, you've dumped MS Office by now.

Dreamweaver - This is a tough one because you should probably rethink your environment to realize you most likely don't really want Dreamweaver to be used. Unless you're just using Slashdot to conveniently survey the geek mindshare, the odds are that WYSIWYG is an old paradigm no longer needed by most scenarios. What you probably want is some kind of content management engine which your key tech person(s) can administer such that your Marketing department can monkey with the website(s). One engine could be adapted to various websites, if you proposed such a need. If I were to suppose someone was trolling Slashdot, then I would mention Quanta Plus before realizing Marketing droids would be helplessly confined to Windows and thus I'd point to Nvu as your capable hero.

But, really, if an evaluation of your technical needs leads you back to WYSIWYG, then you've made a logical error somewhere. The days for that hobbled solution are definitely over.

There you have it! Free and open source software is up to the challenge is most regards. Where there are shortcomings, there are adept proprietary solutions for far, far less than the onerous cost of Adobe

Photoshop --> GIMP http://gimp.org/
Illustrator --> Inkscape http://inkscape.org/
InDesign --> Scribus http://www.scribus.net/
GoLive --> Nvu http://www.nvu.com/

I'll let the others here argue/bash/whine/praise each app.

As a complete amateur I have enjoyed Nvu for its interface.

other alternatives may be
http://www.aptana.com/download_all.php
http://www.inkscape.org/ (quite good, but haven't used it for web applications)
http://kompozer.net/

ZDNet has an article on that very subject.

Free Alternatives:

Photoshop -> Gimp
Illustrator -> Inkscape
InDesign -> Scribus
Web Design -> Kompozer, which is a bugfix release of Nvu (there's actually a lot of these, I've also heard Microsoft Visual Web Dev Express, which has a lot of praise from various people)

Not sure of a good PDF editor, but it looks like this claims to do the trick (though i'm sure is nowhere near the level of Acrobat Pro): PDFEdit. Be warned it looks like it's a cygwin port to windows...

I can't guarantee that those will all live up to your expectations, but I am fairly familiar with most of that software, and it certainly gets the job done.

Inkscape is making moves toward 3d. Just being able to produce a wireframe in Inkscape would take much of the pain out of using Blender. http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Googles_Su mmer_Of_Code#3D_Tool IMHO Blender and the deranged robot of the same name have a lot in common.

My daughter just attended a seminar where the UI expert posited the three Es. Ease of use, ease of remembering and something else that translated as power. The way the presenter described it, you couldn't have all three. Bullroar. A good program is one that I can use intuitively. If I am going to use the program a lot, there are shortcuts available. For instance, my students can get something to work with menus and the mouse. I can do the same thing two or three times as fast from the keyboard. I guess the thing is that a decent program has more than one possible UI.

Someone at Apache, IBM, or Sun announce that they are going to introduce a truely cross platform, open source, and Free alternative to Silverlight and Flash.

Just off the top of my head there's SVG as a potential format. I think a standard exists for turning XML into binary or hexadecimal (WBXML? WBML? I can't remember what it was called) for optimization. After that you need a set of tools to make content development easy. I suppose you could look towards OpenLaszlo for a model on the programming end. In other words, JavaScript + XML compiling to SVG (it's more complex and so shouldn't be dealt with directly) and then to the optimized form. InkScape, if it's mature enough, could be used for the actual graphical assets. I have no idea what could replace Flash's embedded video, but this might be a good opportunity for the Theora codec (if it ever gets out of alpha).

You're right that there would need to be a big push by a powerful entity, though. It's a matter of visibility plus follow-through, I think.

Hmm.. no alternatives? I guess you are correct, nothing compares to say Photoshop, or even InDesign ... I mean, not even anyone to compete with Premiere. (sigh) If only there were somewhere to find some options to compete with all these Adobe monopoly products...

YouTube.

I have not actually seen what is on their CD, but there are some examples of free programs, most of which, have already been mentioned, that are available for both Windows and Linux.

• Firefox Web browser
• Thunderbird full-featured email program
• GIMP Image Manipulation Program
• ImageMagick software suite for creating, editing, and composing bitmap images
• Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor
• ClamWin free antivirus scanner for Windows
• 7-Zip file archiver
• Celestia space simulater that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions
• OpenOffice office suite
• Scribus professional page layout program
• AbiWord word processing program
• Gnumeric spreadsheet
• LyX Document Processor
• Gaim multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client
• Audacity Sound Editor
• Blender the advanced 3D modeling program capable of producing high quality animations
• VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server
• Nvu complete Web Authoring System

Yeah, I endorse all of those, especially PDFCreator. Also, Inkscape, Audacity, and VLC.

It's specialized, but if you need a UNIX-like enviroment under Windows, Cygwin is wonderful.

The only way that I can see to fix that is to design a universal package tree, and convince all the major distros to conform to it.

Which is why I use FreeBSD...

For example, say I want to install Inkscape:

1. Log in as root.
2. cd to /usr/ports/graphics/inkscape
3. make install clean
4. Log in to my normal user account.
5. Add the command inkscape to my menu.
6. Click on it and run inkscape.

Or I coupd eleminate steps 2 and 3 and just type pkg_add -r inkscape... but then it wouldn't be compiled.

And it all comes from one big central respotory.. the FreeBSD ports collection.

I'm a big fan of http://plone.org/ which is a CMS that sits on top of the http://www.zope.org/ application server. All of which is OSS. I can't speak to OSS CRM but others here have. There are plenty of fantastic server side developer productivity boosting OSS software out there.

• Try http://jakarta.apache.org/ for lots of Java libraries.
• I find http://www.springframework.org/ is a great framework extension for Java.
• I like spring better, but http://www.hibernate.org/ provides an ORM for both Java and .NET developers.
• If you are working in Perl, then http://www.cpan.org/ is the place for you.

When it comes to client side software there is a huge amount of great OSS apps.

• I believe that http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganttproject/ is great for project management.
• I have used http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/ for years and know it to be a great mind mapping tool.
• I believe that http://live.gnome.org/Dia/ is a great diagramming tool.
• I'm a big fan of http://www.umlet.com/ and find it to be very useful for creating UML diagrams.
• I switched from sodipodi to http://www.inkscape.org/ which is fantastic for drawing vector images.
• I am also a big fan of http://www.gimp.org/ which is used to draw raster images.

I have used all of these projects for years and would most definitely label them as quality, winner OSS.

Agreed! Especially for photographers, serious amateurs and pros. When GIMP offers at least 12 bit colour depth then it may be a good cheap, free, replacement for Photoshop.

If you want to take on photoshop... You have to get serious. Its not that hard to make a better app than photoshop. Painter and Alias Sketchbook pro both feature things that make photoshop seem primative....

Are Painter and Alias really good photo editors, better than PS? I'm hoping to break into photography but as I'm on disability and don't work I can't justify the expense of PS. So I've been considering other programs like Painter, Blender, Xara Xtreme, Inkscape, or ImageMagick. I'm hoping to get a Macbook Pro rsn and when I do I've give them a test drive.

Last time i ran linux.. the whole dependency thing drove me mad and installing things were varied experiences.

Linspire is coming out with ports for different distros of linux for Click N Run or CNR. Installing software with it means there's no dependencies to deal with, CNR takes care of installing software. Once the CNR software is installed the user goes to the CNR software warehouse, choose what software they want, then click the install button. CNR downloads and installs the software, if there are any dependencies it takes care of them. Linux geeks may frown on such things, but they have to realize that if they want the average computer user to use Linux then there has to be an easy way for users to install apps.

• flpsed
• PDF Edit
• KWord
• Scribus
• Inkscape
• GIMP
• pdftk
• Jarnal
• Multivalent

If the comics that Microsoft comes out with are not funny enough perhaps other people should try to create their own more amusing alternative comic advertisements. They could be done in a style that is somewhat similar to the comics that Microsoft hands out. They could be a spoof of the Microsoft comics. Of course when doing a spoof they should probably check how to best do that legally.

The comic might start out with an employee of some unmentioned software company lecturing some children about how using pirated software is stealing. He would then ask the children what they would do if they owned a computer and WGA discovered discovered that their were not using a genuine version of Windows Vista and would only let them connect to the Internet for one hour at a time. A young boy might then raise his hand, and say "one hour would be just enough time to download a free copy of Ubuntu Linux. I could stay legal by using free GPL licensed software instead." A young girl might then raise her hand and say something like this. "There are hundreds of properly licenced free Linux programs that you could then easily dowload and easily installed using Synaptic (with a screenshot of Synaptic in the background). It is a complete alternative ecosystem of free GPL software." The first boy might then add that "their is also tons of properly licensed free GPL software for Windows users too. In the final frame of the comic another resposible adult might give this final moral advice (as the disapproving exasperated software company employee looks on). "Don't be a software pirate, if you can't afford to pay for commercial software use the free properly licensed GPL software instead."

Underneath the comic strip it might metion that this comic strip was created with the following properly licensed free software:

• Gimp
• Inkscape
• Scribus

Near the bottom of the comic strip there might also be something about this comic strip having been released under the Creative Commons license. "So feel free copy make copies of this comic stip and share them with your friends at school."

Don't be a software pirate, stay legal and properly licensed by using the various free open source GPL licensed programs instead that are also available in Windows versions. Many of the best free GPL licensed open source programs which have been developed for Linux users have also been released in Windows versions. Not everyone is ready yet to move from Windows to a free GPL licensed alternative such as Ubuntu Linux. For them, a first step to freedom would be to keep on using a properly licensed copy of Windows, but to start using the various free GPL licensed alternatives to their various favorite programs. Someday, if they decide to move to a totally free operating system such as Linux they will then be able to use the Linux versions of those same programs. There is now an amazingly large complete alternative free software ecosystem of free GPL licenced software legally available for free to everyone.

Here are just a few examples of free (mostly GPL licensed) programs which are also available in Windows versions:

• OpenOffice the free office suite
• Mozilla Firefox web browser
• Thunderbird email program
• Clamwin free antivirus
• Gimp image mainpulation program for photo retouching and image composition
• ImageMagick software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images
• Inkscape open source scalable vector graphics editor
• PuTTY: A Free Telnet/SSH Client
• FTP client and server
• 7-Zip file archiver which can handle compression formats such as 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
• Scribus open source page layout application
• AbiWord the free word processing program
• Gnumeric the free spreadsheet program
• Stellarium free open source planetarium
• Celestia free space simulation and space exploration program