Free & open-source software is good for you & for the world
Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Before the term open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; open source gained hold with the rise of the Internet, and the attendant need for massive retooling of the computing source code.
Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. Subsequently, a new, three-word phrase “open source software” was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.
If you are looking at open source software to make your Windows experience more better, I have compiled a list of top 20 open source software for Windows OS.
1.Free Download Manager (FDM)
FDM is one application that encompasses all the features one would expect from a download manager and a lot more too for free!
Features:Download Acceleration and Resume support, BitTorrent support, Streaming video download support, Organized interface, Perfect Working, Free.
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2.Mozilla Firefox Web browser
Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation, and a large community of external contributors. Mozilla Fire Fox protects you from viruses, spyware and pop-ups. Enjoy the improvements Mozilla Firfox offers to web browsing performance, usability, privacy and security. Mozilla Firefox is 100% free and is rated the best web browser by many reliable sources.
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3.Pidgin
Connect to multiple IM accounts simultaneously in a single app, including: AOL IM, MSN, and Jabber.
Pidgin is free and contains no ads. All our code is open source and licensed under the GNU General Public License. This means you can get Pidgin’s underlying code and modify it to suit your needs, as long as you publish the changes you make for everyone to benefit from as well.
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4.Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a fully featured, secure and very functional email client and RSS feed reader. It lets you handle mail efficiently and with style, and Mozilla Thunderbird filters away junk mail too.
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5.Songs Bird
Songbird free and open media player that works with all modern web services, and across the newest generation of media players and smart phones.Which means you can get your music wherever you want it, they way you want it.
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6.VLC
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player supporting most audio and video formats (H.264, Ogg, DivX, MKV, TS, MPEG-2, mp3, MPEG-4, aac, …) from files, physical media (DVDs, VCD, Audio-CD), TV capture cards and many network streaming protocols.Pretty good interface.
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7.Gom Player
GOM Player includes many codecs (XviD, DivX, FLV1, AC3, OGG, MP4, H263 and more) so you won’t need to install separate codecs for most videos. For those videos that require a separate codec, GOM Player will find one and direct you to a place where you can download an open source version of the codec.Pretty cool interface.
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8.Image Burn
ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit!You can use it to build DVD Video discs (from a VIDEO_TS folder), HD DVD Video discs (from a HVDVD_TS folder) and Blu-ray Video discs (from a BDAV / BDMV folder) with ease.It’s a very flexible application with several advanced features that are often lacking in other tools, especially when it comes to burning DVD Video discs.
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9.GIMP
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.It contains information about downloading, installing, using, and enhancing it. This site also serves as a distribution point for the latest releases.
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10.Notepad++
Notepad Plus Plus is a Notepad replacement with an eye toward programmers, although it should also appeal to the casual user who wants a cross between Notepad and WordPad. Notepad Plus Plus has some noticeable differences from WordPad. Support for tabs is key, letting users manage different documents simultaneously. Line-numbering is important, too, a feature that nobody mucking about in C should be without.
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11.Media Player Classic
Media Player Classic Home Cinema is an extremely light-weight media player for Windows. It looks just like Windows Media Player v6.4, but has many additional features. You can use the player as a Media Player Classic Home Theater.
Media Player Classic Home Cinema project is based on the original "Media Player Classic" SourceForge project created by Gabest. After the original author stopped working on it the new versions came under the new project called Media Player Classic Home Cinema also hosted at SourceForge.net.
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12.Miro
Beautiful interface. Plays any video type (much more than windows media player). Subscribe to video RSS, download, and watch all in one. Torrent support. Search and download from YouTube and others...
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13.MPlayer
MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems (see the documentation). It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies.
Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+.
MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own: MPsub). DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions) are supported as well.
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14.PeaZip
Open Source file and archive manager: flexible, portable, secure, and free as in freedom.
Extract, create and convert multiple archives at once, create self-extracting archives, split/join, strong encryption, secure deletion, advanced search and compare features...
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15.Miro Video Converter
A super simple way to convert almost any video to MP4, WebM (vp8), Ogg Theora, or for Android, iPhone, and more. 100% Free and open-source.Miro Video Converter has presets that will convert video to the correct sizes and formats for popular phones, iPods, and other media players. Just convert your video and copy it to your device.
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16.CrystalDiskInfo
CrystalDiskInfo is a HDD health monitoring utility. It displays basic HDD information, monitors S.M.A.R.T. values, and disk temperature.
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17.Audacity
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:
* Record live audio.
* Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
* Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
* Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
* Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
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18.RSSOwl
You can display news feeds side by side in multiple tabs. This gives you a similar user experience you might already be familiar with from your web browser. Of course you can configure RSSOwl to limit the number of opened tabs or to not use tabs at all if you are not a big fan of them.
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19.LibreOffice
LibreOffice is a comprehensive, professional-quality productivity suite that you can download and install for free. There is a large base of satisfied LibreOffice users worldwide, and it is available in more than 30 languages and for all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Suse, ...)
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20.FileZilla
FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.
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Enjoy The Freedom............
