Saturday, January 8, 2011

Open Source FREE software

Just wanted to share some open source FREE software in case you haven't heard of them and don't want to pay for increasingly expensive and bloated Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, microsoft Office packages.

Instead of Photoshop, try:
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.
http://www.gimp.org/

Instead of Illustrator or Corel Draw, try:
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. 
http://www.inkscape.org

Instead of Microsoft office, try:
OpenOffice.org: 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. 
- some other alternatives:
1.  http://sixrevisions.com/graphics-design/10-excellent-open-source-and-free-alternatives-to-photoshop/
2. http://www.artweaver.de/home-en/
3. http://garmahis.com/software/illustrator-free-alternatives/

Nothing can completely replace such feature rich pay products as the industry standards but for most users these alternatives are great for home and even functional for commercial use. For more info on Open Source Software, go here: 
http://sourceforge.net/about and here: http://opensource.org/

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