Open Source Productivity: Check.
by Alex
I know that, as a convert, I am already preaching to the converted. But still. At the end of my first day of work after my dissertation — catching up on correspondence, blog design, making graphics, etc — I don’t think I ever touched a piece of software (other than the OS) that was not either free as in beer or free as in speech or both. Professional design people etc. need professional programs and so forth, but for most of us Open Source or Free As In Beer Software really eliminates the need to buy anything. Consider:
Office Productivity: Open Office
Email: Thunderbird
Browser: FireFox
Coding/text editor: Notepad++
SVG Graphics: Inkspot
Photoshop: GIMP
Photo organizing: Picasa2 (there are a multitude but that’s what I use)
Music: WinAMP (steadily getting lamer, but still around), AudioGrabber
SFTP: Fillezilla
SSH: Putty
Half Life 2: Ok I’m still working on finding a replacement for this one
And then the webservices! I think today I used flickr, bloglines, rojo, del.icio.us, CiteULike, amazon, scholar.google.com, wordpress, wikipedia… it’s enough to make your head spin.
This isn’t news, I’m well aware. But, I don’t know… today it just hit me how little point there is in buying software applications anymore.
One area where, AFAIK, OSS hasn’t produced a reasonable alternate to payware is vector illustration. The canonical program, of course, is Adobe Illustrator, but I’ve been (and continue to be) a loyal Canvas user since version 3.
And a big feature missing from GIMP is support for the CMYK or Lab color spaces. This isn’t an esoteric feature — the ability to work in and mix multiple colorspaces is extremely useful when doing restoration and color correction of photos. Dan Margulis explains this in his Professional Photoshop books, which I consider to be on par with Mastering Regular Expressions as far as being a useful tutorial.
Inkspot? Do you mean Inkscape?
Ooops I mean Inkscape. Last night I apparently confused the program with the doowop group. Fixed now — thanks! And thm: yeah I agree that if you are serious into the vector stuff then Illustrator is probably the way to go. If you’re drawing very simple diagrams for your diss, however, that (or Open Office’s draw program) will do ya just fine.