How to choose freeware or free of charge open source application

OK, this is more then howto hopefully a usable list of applications I use instead of their commercial counterparts. It is also the recommendation for companies when they want to save money on licenses, therefore I choose only those applications/versions that can be used commercially.

The case:

Your department is short of money on buying that great application your colleague saw yesterday from his friend. You believe it should be helpful to obtain the licenses for such software, but your bosses say NO. It was not in the financial plan.

Sounds familiar? Yes, it happened to me, too. But I did not hesitate and tried to find the alternative.  The working alternative.

So, here it goes:

The goal:

• save money 
• legal use of software
• best of the breed application

Conditions and limitations:

• alternative application has to be usable on MS Windows (2000 and later)
• alternative application has to be of enough quality and stable
• I have tested most of these applications, if there is no application noted I would like to find one
• this table is changing as I am using this info myself :)

Interesting findings:

• OSS applications are often usable even though their version is bellow 1, i.e. for example 0.7. However big OSS applications (such as GIMP etc.) are user-friendly when they reach version 2.

Replacement table (click on any link to find the tool)

SW group sub-group Typical tool / leader of the market Free replacement application Graphics (gfx) Bitmap gfx Adobe Photoshop GIMP2, additional Gimpshop Vector gfx (for DTP) Corel Draw Adobe Illustrator Inkscape? Sodipodi? 2D animation Macromedia Flash Mirage 3D modelling Maya, Rhinoceros Blender Creation of 3D programms Panda 3D, Blender CSS Topstyle3 Pro Topstyle3 Lite?, Morphon-CSSEditor DTP Quark Sodipodi? Panorama creation Panorama Tools Scenery generation Terragen Mozaics rendering Mosaic Creator Booklet CD photoindex generator CDPhotoIndex Image Viewer ACDSee, Zoner Picasa IrfanView Xnview imgSeek (searches by content of image) CAD DWG Viewer Bentley View DVD 2 DivX convertor DivX Create Bundle ?Dr.DivX 2 shall be OSS in Sep/2005 Office (productivity) Word processor MS Word OO.org Writer Abiword Spreadsheet calc. MS Excel OO.org Calc Presentation MS PowerPoint OO.org Impress Technical (engineering) drawing MS Visio Dia (http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/ http://dia-installer.sourceforge.net/ ) Project planning MS Project It was planned to be in v2 OO.org Personal DB MS Access OO.org v2 PDF creation Adobe Acrobat PDFCreator Mind maps Mind Manager FreeMind OCR ABBYY Finereader (it can be used to convert pdf into MS Word doc, supporting czech language) Print filter (virtual printer - exact preview, always the same printer for MS Office docs [there is nochange of docs after printing], saves paper) Fineprint SW Modelling UML modelling Rational Rose, Power Designer ArgoUML ERD modelling Power Designer DB Designer (only for MySQL, not very stable) Emulation MAC (PowerPC) emulator PearPC PC emulator VMWare, Virtual PC Qemu coLinux (only for Linux distributions) http://wiki.colinux.org/ Bochs (usable only in certain cases) DOSemu (only for DOS emulation) Commodore 64, 128 and others WinVice Internet Browser Internet Explorer Mozilla Firefox My extensions: Adblock, ImageZoom, googleBar, ForecastFox, Live http Headers, downThemAll, Print Preview, DictionarySearch, BookmarksHome, ScrapBook Downloader Flashget Leechget, Net Transport Email client Outlook Express Mozilla Thunderbird FTP server WS_FTP Server, IIS FTP FileZilla server Instant messaging ICQ, AOL, MS Messenger Miranda, Jabber Whole web capturing Teleport Pro WinHTTrack, wget Telnet, ssh SecureCRT Putty SW presentations (flash demos on web - viewlets) Quarbon Viewlet builder Wink RSS reader (web news) FeedDemon rssowl.org Feedreader Sage extension pro Mozillu Mozilla Thunderbird Other .exe .dll compression UPX Audio sound - easy edits Soundforge Audacity Screen as a virtual connected cam (driver) Camtasia studio (recorder) !!! please, I need to find such one !!! CD/DVD burning Nero Clone CD Burn4Free, CDBurnerXP (+DVD Shrink.org to copy DVD9) Web building Macromedia Dreamweaver Nvu File manager Total commander Salamander freeCommander CD Audio copying EAC (cardware) DVD player Cyberlink PowerDVD Text editor EditPlus, UltraEdit, … Notepad++ http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm Antivirus Firewall - personal Kerio personal firewall? (not sure about the license though) Jetico Personal firewall (needs better knowledge to setup) .zip compression Winzip 7zip (www.7-zip.org) File access over html Net2ftp.org Development Visual Studio .Net Sharpdevelop http://www.sharpdevelop.com/OpenSource/SD/ DB Frontend Glom SCM (source code management [versioning and group support]) Visual Source Safe, Clear Case, Perforce Subversion (why subversion, other comparison) cvs ERP   TinyERP (not tested yet, it just looks interesting) XML Editor XML Spy XMLMind XMLEditor Reporting / Business Inteligence Crystal reports Birt for Eclipse

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Created by Radek Švarz

Oh, don't worry about the Google ads, I just want to see what is related on the market now. Yes free applications are not linked directly. That's because their hosting changes frequently and I don't want to handle broken links.