Pacific Side

I find people often spend unnecessary amounts of time and money either paying for expensive software or trying to obtain said software by illegal means when there are in fact plenty of free solutions out there. The Yahoo! front page recently ran an article on good free software. I agreed with some things on the list but not all. Here's my list of non-intrusive, well-made free software:

• Adobe Reader – PDF document viewer
• Audacity – Audio recording
• AVG Free Edition – Antivirus software (think free Norton/Symantec/McAfee)
• CDBurnerXP – CD/DVD burning (think free Nero)
• Daemon Tools – CD/DVD emulation for mounting ISO images
• DVD Fab HD Decrypter – Rip any DVD directly to an ISO image
• Microsoft Virtual PC – Virtualization for Windows virtual machines
• Microsoft Visual Studio Express – Microsoft SQL Server Express and other tools
• Microsoft Windows Defender – Antispyware software
• Mozilla Firefox – Web browser
• MySQL – Database server
• OpenOffice.org – Office suite (think free Microsoft Office)
• PHP – Server-side scripting support
• PrimoPDF – PDF document generator (think free Adobe Acrobat)
• PSPad Editor – Lightweight IDE (what I work in at Yahoo!)
• QuickTime and iTunes – Movie trailers, music, etc.
• Shareaza – File sharing
• SmartCVS – CVS client
• Ubuntu – Easy-to-use and good-looking version of the Linux operating system (think Mac OS X for PC…sort of)
• VMWare Server – Virtualization for Linux virtual machines
• WinRAR – Handler for RAR, ISO, etc. packages
• WinSCP – FTP/SCP client