Free and open-source software
(See also the bookmarks on
the
aq.org home page.)
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Freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net/) lists and indexes lots of free and open-source software (as
well as some commercial/proprietary projects). You can search
by category, license type, maturity level, and various other features.
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SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/) actually hosts open-source projects. They offer people who
host their projects there web space, bug and version tracking,
mailing lists, and so forth. Because SourceForge only lists
projects that are actually hosted there, it has fewer projects
than Freshmeat, but all the projects are licensed under some kind
of open-source license.
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TheOpenCD (http://www.theopencd.org/) is a collection of open-source software that runs under Windows.
Aimed at non-technical users, it's basically intended as a
showcase to introduce people to open-source software.
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OpenOffice.org (also included on
TheOpenCD) is a free (GPLed) office suite. It started out as StarOffice,
a commercial project by Star Division in Germany, and was bought
by Sun, which still sell a version branded StarOffice, but also
released as much of the code as they could under the GPL. At
the moment, the relationship between OpenOffice.org (GPLed and
free) and StarOffice (cheap but not free, except on Sun's Solaris,
and including some proprietary additions) is similar to that between
Mozilla and Netscape — StarOffice is based on OpenOffice.org.
I haven't used it myself, but by all accounts it's a perfectly
reasonable office suite. It runs under Windows, Linux, and
MacOS X.
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AbiWord (http://www.abisource.com/) is a free (GPLed) word processing program. I've used it,
and it's been fine for everything I do. It runs under Windows
as well as Linux (and a couple less common OSes). It will also
run on MacOS X if you have an X server.
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GnuWin II (http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/) is another CD of free software for Windows.
Last modified 2003.01.24 by
js.