Free Software – Not Always Bad & Crappy

As a word of caution, free software is USUALLY bad and/or crappy…but not always! I found this site listing “the best free and open-source software for Windows“. I currently use or have used many of the products on their list: Firefox (Web Browser), VLC (Media Player), OpenOffice (think M$ Office…without all the $$$), Audacity (Sound Editor), Gimp.app (image editor), and Paint.net (another image editor).

So that got me thinking about the other free programs I use. First of all, SourceForge is a great site that hosts a ton of free programs, but the projects range from abandoned to the idea stage to non-functional to crappy to okay to good to excellent…so explore at your own risk! Also, before I get to MY list, I do hafta acknowledge a good, free product from Microsoft – Windows Defender. If you read any of the articles listed in my blog entry for Vista, you may remember this being mentioned as a standard component of the new OS.

So here’s my addendum to the products listed above:

• Spybot Search & Destroy (Spyware Protection)
• AVG Anti-Virus (Virus Protection)
• Writely (Word Processing)
• maj7 (ChordPro Viewer – Chorded Song Sheets)
• Net Transport (Downloading Tool – Mostly Free!)

Well, just a few notes to finish this longest-post-yet. I guess I could’ve listed iTunes, but if you don’t know about that, I doubt you’d be here reading this blog! What you may not already know is that Writely is an online word processor which was recently bought by Google…hopefully it’ll stay as free and cool as it was before the purchase!