The Intellectual Revolution In The Software Industry: 3 Free Productivity Programs With Professional Appeal

"WE are the definition of Society and WE are the makers of History" Daniel Slack

Corporations are notorious for taking theories, discoveries, and technology, to hide them. Through out the history of business in the United States, there are various examples of unfair business practices being ignored and endorsed by our fair and equal government. From the confidence tricks that Edison ripped off Nikola Tesla with, to the buy out and dismantling of the electric trolley system by General Motors, most corporations are singularly interested in anything that makes a profit. They only want to promote technology that keeps their profit coming, regardless of any benefits to humanity any new technology may have. Even the FCC have made claims and taken steps to try to discourage the potential that open source software offers the public. But there is hope......

The concept of free software grew from the philosophies of cooperation and openness long established in academia and science. Many teacher and scientists believe in the idea that any knowledge, whether it be mathematical, scientific, or mechanical in nature, should be allowed to benefit society in the maximum possible way. Their expectations of monetary gain is often limited to the hopes of just living comfortably and funding their new research projects. The contributions and discoveries are often displayed openly for the good of humanity.

The software sharing community at MIT existed for many years, even predating the internet. Software was produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration. Operating systems, such as early versions of UNIX, were widely distributed and maintained by the community of users. The Source code was distributed with software because users frequently modified the software themselves to fix bugs or add new functionality, and because programmers couldn't possibly create executable machine-code for the wide variety of hardware that existed. Thus in this era, software was free in a sense, not because of any concerted effort by software users or developers, but rather because software was developed by the user community.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, companies began routinely imposing restrictions on programmers through copyright. They saw a way to make money by blocking rights and selling them back. The Founder of Microsoft signaled the change of the times in 1976 when he wrote his now-famous Open Letter to Hobbyists, sending out the message that what hobbyists called "sharing" was "stealing". In 1979 companies for began to enforce its restrictive licenses when the company decided it might profit.

During the following decades, the beatnik and hippy ideals of old had emerged into a more cohesive community, thanks to the internet. The ideals of human fellowship, social consciousness and sharing of knowledge seemed to have gained real-world expression. One form of this expression is the ability to create open source free applications that not only contribute to the free expression of ideas, but also do not put a dent in the pocketbook as well.

I now present to you a list of quality software developed by those with a social conscience.

1 Open Office: Microsoft Office's Archenemy

OpenOffice is the result of over twenty years' software engineering. Designed from the start as a single piece of software, it has a consistency other products cannot match. A completely open development process means that anyone can report bugs, request new features, or enhance the software. The result: OpenOffice does everything you want your office software to do, the way you want it to.

OpenOffice is easy to learn, and if you're already using another office software package, you'll take to OpenOffice straight away. Our world-wide native-language community means that OpenOffice is probably available and supported in your own language. And if you already have files from another office package OpenOffice will probably read them with no difficulty.

Best of all, OpenOffice can be downloaded and used entirely free of any license fees. OpenOffice is released under the LGPL license. This means you may use it for any purpose - domestic, commercial, educational, public administration. You may install it on as many computers as you like. You may make copies and give them away to family, friends, students, employees - anyone you like.

Open Office a very comprehensive software suite, it includes:

OpenOffice Writer: A word processor similar in functionality to Microsoft Word and WordPerfect. It can export Portable Document Format (PDF) files with no additional software, and can function as a basic WYSIWYG editor for creating and editing web pages.

OpenOffice Calc: A spreadsheet similar to Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3 with a roughly equivalent range of features. Calc provides a number of features not present in Excel, including a system which automatically defines series for graphing, based on the layout of the user's data. Calc can write spreadsheets in PDF format.

OpenOffice Impress: A presentation program similar to Microsoft PowerPoint. It can export presentations to Adobe Flash (SWF) files, allowing them to be played on any computer with a Flash player installed. It also includes the ability to create PDF files, and the ability to read Microsoft Power Point's .ppt format. Impress lacks ready-made presentation designs. However, templates are readily available on the Internet.

OpenOffice Base: A database management program similar to Microsoft Access. Base allows the creation and manipulation of databases, and the building of forms and reports to provide easy access to data for end-users. As with Access, Base may be used as a front-end to a number of different database systems, including Access databases (JET), ODBC data sources and MySQL/PostgreSQL. Base became part of the suite starting with version 2.0. Native to the OpenOffice suite is an adaptation of . While Base can be a front-end for any of the databases listed, there is no need for any of them to be installed.

OpenOffice Draw: A vector graphic editor comparable in features to early versions of CorelDraw. It features versatile "connectors" between shapes, which are available in a range of line styles and facilitate building drawings such as flowcharts. It has similar features to desktop publishing software such as Scribus and Microsoft Publisher.

OpenOffice Math: A tool for creating and editing mathematical formulae, similar to Microsoft Equation Editor. Formulae can be embedded inside other OpenOffice.org documents, such as those created by Writer. It supports multiple fonts and can export to PDF.

For more information or to download this wonderful Productivity Suite:
http://www.openoffice.org

2 Gimp: Open Source Software For The Professional Photographer

Gimp is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many features that is equal to, or even surpasses the venerable Adobe Photoshop. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an on line batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Gimp has a full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, and many others. It Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing. Other features include

Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool

Supports custom brushes and patterns

Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space

Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time

Advanced Manipulation

Full alpha channel support

Layers and channels

Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)

Editable text layers

Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip

Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy

Foreground extraction tool

Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.

Transformable paths, transformable selections.

Quickmask to paint a selection.

A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu

Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)

Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters

Over 100 plug-ins already available

Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format

MNG support

Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)

Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)

Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)

File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others

Load, display, convert, save to many file formats

SVG path import/export

This software can be downloaded at:
http://www.gimp.org/

An Online Manual and Usage Guide can be found at:
http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/

3. Scribus: Professional Publishing at a Pittance Price

Even with the best office suites, it is sometimes hard to incorporate complex page layouts and feature rich content. Microsoft created MS Publisher to cater to the "Newsmen," those who wish to endeavor to create professional grade publications. Unfortunately, MS Publisher was cost prohibitive for most amateurs to start their own home based magazine.

Scribus is a highly versatile and useful tool for desktop publishing and can handle all the functions of MS Publisher with relative ease. It gives you the ability to create all of those image rich documents, such as magazines, brochures, newsletters that depend on flash and creativity to look appealing to a mass audience. Your magazines and newsletters that were white pages and black text would now have professional pizzazz and interest.

Scribus has a wonderful interface, but as you use it you will discover dozens of options hidden in the menus. The Scribus Wiki's offers an excellent tutorial. The walkthrough on the magazine creation process will help immensely for you to grow familiar with the tools Scribus has to offer. In only a few hours, you'll be throwing out professional documents like you never have before.

You can download it at: http://www.scribus.net/

The user guide can be found at:
http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Get_Started_with_Scribus

These titles are just the tip of the iceberg for what is available. In these hard economic times, it is nice to know that your creativity and productivity does not have to be effected. I implore you to search for the free alternatives to your future software purchases, you will be happy you did. Here is a list of current Open Source software:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_software_packages

Once again I wish to close with the wisdom of our forefather, Thomas Jefferson:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. "

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