19th of september is world software freedom day.In this e-era,for a country like India that takes pride in its Information Technology sector and entrepreneurship in IT and IT-enabled services,Free and Open Source Softwares(FOSS) is not just for geeks and techies.Now-a-days software is becoming user-community oriented rather than techies oriented.
These days many FOSS are available online that do a decent job very similar to their proprietary counterparts.These FOSS matters great not just because they are available free.More than that, they are very simple to download,free to run,copy,modify and distribute.These are enabled by the fact that their source code are freely available.
OPEN SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS:
FOSS------------------------------------------------PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE
Blender 3D ---------------------------------------------------Maya,3DSMax
Scilab,Octave--------------------------------------------------Matlab
Gimp ------------------------------------------------------Adobephotoshop
ArgoUml---------------------------------------------------IBMRrtionalRose
Picasa---------------------------------------------DigiKam,Fspot
OpenOffice,KOffice-----------------------------------------MS-Office
InkScape-------------------------------------------Adobe Illustrator
Gtkpod---------------------------------------------ITunes
Mplayer,Xine,VLC--------------------------------- WMP,Power DVD,Roxio
Amarok,Rhythmbox,--------------------------------- Winamp,Jukebox
Songbird
Kpdf,Evince,Okular------------------------------- Adobe Acrobat Reader
Mozilla Firefox,Konqureor -----------------------Internet Explorer
Mozilla Thunderbird,Kmail --------------------- Outlook,Outlook Express
QCAD------------------------------------------- AutoCad(2D's)
Kicad(schematics for PCBs)----------------------Eagle
Planner-------------------------------------------Ms-Project
Thus lots of softwares are available free of cost online which can be installed in our system with a simple "Run" click.If anything goes wrong,we are just hitting remove programs button from the control panel making everything normal.So,nomore chasing of vendors to buy different products!!!
Gone are the days when software is viewed as commodity.Right now,Software is a service for the common user too..
