Top 5 Open Source Projects

Everyone loves getting a deal when they go shopping, with online software the world is evolving into a concept of “everything should be free”. You might first think well only crazy people would say and support that. Thing is there are thousands of really smart developers that believe in this concept, so much so that in the past few years there has been amazing FREE projects available for people to download and use at their will; Most of which are under the GPL (General Public License).

The top 5 most useful open source projects that I currently use for my business needs are:

1. I love firefox! If you are currently using Internet Explorer (IE) you are simply missing out on a much richer browsing experience. Firefox is faster, sexier, and it just plain works better. It seems to obey the W3C (standards) more than IE does, so when you really think about it there are no cons to using this browser. It’s free to use and there are a number of great Add-ons. You can download the newest version of Firefox here.

2. Mozilla Thunderbird is a free email client, very similar to outlook express and other email clients. The one thing that Thunderbird has over its competition is that developers are constantly making new add-ons for your email organizer. It by no means is as powerful as Microsoft Outlook yet, but I think it will get there before too long. If you need to keep costs down I would suggest downloading Thunderbird here and trying it out for a test run. If you find any useful plugins please post them in the comments of this Blog!

3. What is Wordpress? Well you are looking at it! This Blog is a wordpress Blog. If you are interested in getting your own Blog set up, and absolutely Free, then Wordpress is for you. You can download a free template, there must be over a million of them to choose from, and then you can start writing posts right away. There is also a variety of plugins that can make your Blog extremely powerful. This is almost a must have for small to medium sized businesses these days. Blogs are the way a lot of businesses are reaching out to their customers on a more personal approach. I don’t want to rehearse myself too much but Simple helix (My hosting provider) also provides one click installs of Wordpress - takes 1 minute to set up.

4. If you’re wondering what Filezilla is, its a bit more for the developer or website updater. It’s an FTP (File Transfer Protocol), which in other words is a program that takes the files from your computer and updates them on your website. It’s not only free but it’s very easy to use. You enter your website/host information and you’re all ready to go. It’s such a huge time saver if you plan on maintaining a website. I personally love Filezilla and now that I have used it I can’t live without it.

5. VLC is a video player that plays just about every file format out there. Have you ever downloaded a video of any sort and had problems playing it? You especially might be familiar with this problem if you currently use Windows Media Player. I would like to send out a special thank you to the VLC team for making this piece of Free software. It’s made my life so much easier.

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