Do you ever wish you had a certain piece of software for a certain kind of work but then you realize that you’re a volunteer and you really don’t have an income to spend on software? Yeah, me too. But fear not, there is a remedy. Open source software can help you in your times of trouble. Open source software is free to download and use and it can be just as good, if not better, than the software you buy.
A great repository of open source software is www.sourceforge.net. Things are broken down into categories if you want to browse for programs. You can also do a keyword search to narrow your results.
Some great open source programs I use are:
- GIMP (a Photoshop-like program): http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-win/
- Scribus (a desktop publishing program): http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/
- PDF Split and Merge (self-explanatory): http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfsam/
- LibreOffice (open source office suite): http://sourceforge.net/projects/libreoffice.mirror/
Just keep in mind as you’re using these that they’re not exact clones of the programs you are trying to replace. They’ll have a learning curve but there’s a lot of people online who also had to learn and they’ve posted their solutions across the web.