vrage

I wondered why people are so reluctant to adopt open source software in their daily life. The corporate world was skeptical for a long time to use open source software such as linux in their business until recently. Now, open source software have become so reliable that they are much better off than their commercial counterparts.

Think of softwares such as Linux which is a roboust operating system when compared to windows xp. I havent tried windows visa yet but i swear that linux never crashes. Apache has been a stable webserver used by many websites. When it comes to encryption, PGP has been very reliable. Some intelligence agencies consider it too good for encryption of your data or emails etc.

GIMP is a popular Image processing software which has all the functionalities of photoshop and Email client thunderbird replaces outlook express very easily. There are movie players such as xine, kaffeine or Mplayer or VLC player which provide features much better than your windows media player. Instant messaging clients such as Kopete and GAIM fare support all messenger protocols such as yahoo, icq, msn , AIM,jabber etc. XMMS can support almost all features of winamp.

Gnu C++, QT, kdevelop and ANJUTA are very good development environments for writing code in C, C++ and Java. Anjuta and QT are my favorite IDE’s which i had used to develop code in a linux environment. Anjuta is a visual studio like IDE which is very simple to use and not too complicated for the novice user. Eclipse has been the standard IDE for Java on linux machines. It has powerful features which are only found in high priced commmerical softwares.

Open source software has revolutionized computing and general computer usage much to the fear of those ‘corporations’ which had the market share for all softwares ever produced. I am a huge fan of the “freedom” concept of open source software where we can choose what softwares we want to use and how much control we can have over them. Richard stallman is the pioneer of free software who started this idea of free software in the 80’s. It is time that people have realized that it is better to have open source source softwares than use an OS which might monitor your internet usage or your personal records by keeping data mining software or allowing third parties to track you. I am waiting to see how reliable commercial software can be when compared to open source softwares such as linux inspite of their many flaws which we have seen so far.