Free Software

One of the greatest things about having a computer in today's world is the variety of free and open source software available to us. These projects range from lone programmers coding software in their free time to large non-profit organizations coding professional-quality software at no cost to the user. The GNU/Linux operating system ships with a huge variety of open source software, however, Windows ships with nothing. This page is dedicated to exposing some of the more useful open source software projects for use on the Windows operating system.

First of all, if you are interested in running open source software on Windows (you are reading this web page, after all), please take a look at TheOpenCD. It has many of the programs on this page and much more. You may need the Bzip2 program to decompress the ISO images, you can get a Windows version in the GNU utilities for Win32 project.

Network Applications

• Mozilla Firefox - the best web browser out there.
• Mozilla Thunderbird - the best email and newsgroup program for Windows.
• Filezilla - full-featured FTP client and server. Supports SFTP, FTP over SSL.
• WinSCP - lean and mean FTP/SFTP client. Also supports SCP, which is similar to SFTP.
• Jabber - open-source XML-based instant messaging protocol.
• PuTTY - free telnet/SSH client. Allows you to connect to a remote Unix box with a text login over SSL (the same protocol behind HTTPS) using either certificates or passwords as credentials.

Desktop Applications

• OpenOffice.org (OOo) - free alternative to Microsoft Office. Supports importing/exporting Microsoft Office documents, as well as exporting to Adobe's PDF format with a single mouse click.
• Abiword - word processor.
• The Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) - referred to by some as Photoshop for Linux, The Gimp is a free image/photo editing program with Windows versions available.
• vi Improved (Vim) - classic Unix modal text editor. Has a GUI, supports the mouse, scripting, syntax highlighting, plugins, and more.
• X Emacs - the other old-school Unix text editor. It is more of a full-featured IDE than text editor, containing everything but the kitchen sink.

Server Applications

• Apache HTTPd - enterprise-class web server supporting many useful features. Used on more than half the production web servers in the world.
• MySQL - SQL database server. Lacks some features such as triggers and stored procedures, but since PostgreSQL does not have a Windows version, this is the only open source database for Windows that I know about.
• PHP - Server-side HTML-embedded scripting language used to serve dynamic content. Currently one of the most popular CGI languages on the planet. (Okay, technically it is not CGI, but close enough)

Games

• pySolitaire - collection of several hundred solitaire games, including tile games such as Majjhong. Requires Python to be installed.
• ZDoom - good old fashioned Doom, released by id Software in 1994. John Carmack released the source code under the GPL, and while ZDoom itself has a special license, it is still open source and free. Download this, point it to the data files you got from id Software, and enjoy Doom in high resolution with features found in modern 3D engine games.

Development

• GNU utilities for Win32 - Native Win32 versions of most of the standard Unix utilities (rm, ls, gzip, tar, pwd, touch, et al).
• Cygwin - Unix emulator for Windows. Provides a POSIX environment capable of running quite a few Unix programs, all you have to do is recompile. It even has the ability to run an X-window server, allowing X apps to run both locally and remotely on the local display.
• ActiveState - while they sell IDEs, they provide language implementations for Perl, Tcl, and Python for free on Windows.
• MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows) - Windows version of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) with hooks into Microsoft's CRT and Windows API. Has GCC, G++, Make, and many other Unix staples. Recent version have exceptionally good standards support.