Open-Source Materials

Last week when I attended the Arkansas Technology Institute at AETN they gave us a disk of various types of software that are available for free download on the internet. They are called "open-source" because they are free and available to anyone who wants to download them.

Here is a list of the open-source software items that were introduced to me: * Adobe Acrobat Reader (Most of you probably already know about this one) * Audacity Music (An audio editor) * Open Office Suite (It does word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more) * Web Browsers such as Foxfire and Safari * Anim8or (A computer annimation application) or FlipBook * GIMP (A multi-platform photo manipulation tool) * DVD Decrypter (A software application that can create backup disc images of the DVD-Video structure of DVDs. It can be used to image any DVD, but controversially it is especially useful for decrypting copy-protected movies.) * MacTheRipper (A free DVD ripper (extractor) for Mac OS X) * DVD Flick (Aims to be a simple but at the same time powerful DVD Authoring tool.) * Nvu (Finally! A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.)

As I said before I only recently learned about all these open-source softwares that are available for free download from the internet. I have not had the opportunity to truly explore them yet, but I have used Audacity to "rip" down songs that I had downloaded into short clips. Also, the instructors at AETN were comparing Open Office Suite to Microsoft.

I don't know that this will be helpful to anyone else but I was very grateful to have this information shared with me and thought that I would pass it on :)