Sunday, December 28, 2008

The 10 Coolest Open Source Products of 2008

I just caught this article tonight off of digg.com: The 10 Coolest Open Source Products of 2008. Open source is free software, designed, created, and maintained by an online community that is dedicated to the application.

I'm not a programmer, so here are the open source products in the article that I am familiar with:
  • OpenOffice.org - A free alternative to MS Office suite. Apparently 2008 version is much more compatible with MS Office.
  • IBM Lotus Symphony - IBM's contribution to OpenOffice, seeking to break Microsoft's domination in office suite software
  • Firefox - An alternative browser to Microsoft Internt Exploser
  • Android - Google's new mobile operating system designed to compete with Apple's iphone application.

I have shied away from using a lot of open source applications due to compatibility issues. But if this is changing, I will consider these open source applications more. And so may many others.

Do you use any of these or other open source applications?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe I'll convert you yet! :-)

John

James Nored said...

John, I was thinking of you when I found this article!

Anonymous said...

I use FIrefox is great, and some of my friends use open office

Anonymous said...

You read wired and Digg James? Wow. Never would have guessed.

Corey

Anonymous said...

Forgot to mention that I use Firefox and OpenOffice. I am a big open source fan.
Corey

James Nored said...

Jason, thanks for sharing. What do you like about Firefox?

James Nored said...

Corey,

Wired and digg are great sources of what is current in the news and technology.

James

Anonymous said...

dare i open my mouth? :D
i've used the OpenOffice since pre 1.0 days, and love it. I haven't installed the 3.0 version yet (due to I have 256M of ram) OpenOffice offers the best of all worlds: it can read and write to MS file formats, wordperfect/corel, and of course the global ODF format. no other office suite can do that.

firefox... same story, I run v1.5 on my memory-limited machine, and at work I've run 2.x series and the 3.0. it is very stable. I've always installed the flashblock, noscript, and tabbed browsing plugins. flashblock is particularly nice for stoping all though headache-causing ads.

other open source...
I've used linux since 1998. in the begining it was very technical to get it running on my laptop, but now I can stick in a CD and a usb key into any machine and use it without altering what ever is install on that machine.
also, my whole company runs on it, and our product runs it. we do real-time network intrusion detection and prevention on gigabit networks. (if that means anything to the readers here)

one last note: check out Ubuntu Christian Edition and ichthux (the kubuntu version).
they both come with internet protection and content filtering apps to protect kids from questionable sites.

Brandon