Top Open Source Software

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Open source software has long been the powerhouse behind the development of the internet, not least LAMP configuration servers that run on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

Most of the best open-source software has had years to refine itself, so we’ve made an effort to look for some more recent tools that have made a splash as well. One of our favourites is the LEGO-building software, stud.io. It’s incredibly intuitive and will have you digitally constructing models from your wildest imaginings immediately. Archimedes is a free and open source CAD software (Computer Aided Design). Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite that supports rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing, and game creation.

While there is a variety of free software programs out there, many are proprietary, meaning that the development company owns the code. With open source software, anyone can add to, edit, and adapt the source code as they see fit.

This is one of the key strengths of open source software, because not only does it invite close scrutiny from a wide range of parties with different interests and skill sets, it also invites wide ranging collaboration.

Because of this, many open source projects have dedicated communities behind them, with developers adding to and evolving features along new coding lines, directions, and standards.

Of course, where open source projects become particularly big their communities can end up splitting into different groups working in different directions, a process known as forking. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Linux operating system, which now comes in many flavors or distros.

Either way, despite the power of proprietary software programs, platforms, and operating systems, open source software remain key in the modern world. Even better, open source can offer users free alternatives to paid-for programs without necessarily sacrificing on features, and you can even customize the software to suit you.

Here then is the best in open source software by type, to show some of the range of open source software opportunities.

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1. LibreOffice

There's no need to pay for Office with this open source alternative

LibreOffice is a full suite of office software, including excellent apps for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases. These are all fully compatible with the latest Microsoft file formats, so you’ll have no trouble sharing files that work with users of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access.

This means that document formatting is properly preserved for printing if you have to import/export files between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, something not all office software platforms can do. However, it is a downloadable product rather than one you can work with in the cloud, unlike some others like Office 365 and G Suite.

Documents look just as sharp and professional as those created using paid-for software, and there are hundreds of templates available to download, use and edit.

LibreOffice’s huge community of contributors have compiled a brilliant collection of support materials, including a forum and even live chat if you need a hand.

Top Open Source Software For Windows

2. GIMP

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Our favorite open source photo editor, packed with powerful tools

Powerful and flexible, open source image editor GIMP is as close to Adobe Photoshop as you can get without opening your wallet. It supports layers, and is packed with advanced tools for enhancing your pictures or creating new ones from scratch.

You can adjust every aspect of your pictures’ appearance manually, or use the dozens of customizable filters and effects to achieve amazing results with just a few clicks. GIMP comes with a huge array of user-created plugins pre-installed, and adding more is a piece of cake.

If you don’t need the power of GIMP and prefer a simpler interface, check out Paint.NET – another superb open source photo editor that’s a little lighter on features, but easier to master.

3. VLC Media Player

An open source media player than can handle virtually any file format

VLC Media Player is one of the world’s most popular free media players, and for good reason – it can handle just about any audio file, video file, or media stream you can throw at it, without the need to mess around installing additional codecs. VLC Media Player gives you an amazing degree of control over playback, letting you optimize video and audio for your specific hardware configuration.

VLC Media Player is ideal for streaming podcasts, as well as internet radio stations like Last.fm and TuneIn Radio. There’s also a superb archive of extensions and skins, and the WYSIWYG Skin Editor lets you create your own custom designs.

The latest addition to VLC is 360-degree playback, which lets you enjoy immersive videos with a VR headset, and more exciting developments are on the horizon to keep pace with new video technology.

4. Shotcut

Great for new users, and an excellent substitute for Windows Movie Maker

If you’re looking for a great open source video editor, give Shotcut a whirl. It might look a little stark at first, but add some of the optional toolbars and you’ll soon have its most powerful and useful features your your fingertips.

Some of its best tools include quick filters for audio and video (which are non-destructive and can be layered to achieve different effects), advanced white balancing, wipes and other transitions, color grading, click-and-drag import, and straightforward trimming and compositing of clips.

5. Audacity

The perfect open source tool for recording and editing podcasts and music

Even if you have the ready cash for an audio editor, you might choose to stick with open source alternative Audacity. It has almost all the tools you need for recording and refining sound files, and any features it lacks can be plugged with its extensive catalog of extensions.

Audacity is the tool of choice for many podcasters, musicians and audiobook narrators thanks to its professional quality results. You can use it to combine clips, copy and paste sections of audio, remove noise and other unwanted noises, strip vocals from songs, alter frequencies, and apply effects like echo and reverb.

6. Mozilla Firefox

An powerful, fully customizable browser with a plugin for every purpose

The browser wars show no sign of ending, but Firefox's open source heritage makes it incredibly flexible. Its main appeal is its collection of extensions. With thousands of plug-ins available at the click of a mouse, it’s easy to transform Firefox into your perfect browser.

Firefox is updated every five to eight weeks, and you can get an early taste of the latest features by installing the beta or taking part in Firefox Test Pilot – a way to sample experimental tools that might be incorporated into future releases.

Firefox’s source code forms the basis of many specialist projects, including the security-focused Tor Browser and speed-centric Waterfox, which is designed with power users in mind.

However, despite Firefox's rise in popularity, the browser has traditionally struggled to handle Flash, resulting in Firefox becoming unstable and consuming processor resources or simply shutting down unexpectedly.

7. Mozilla Thunderbird

A free client that's an ideal replacement for the defunct Windows Live Mail

If you have multiple email accounts – even if they’re with the same provider – open source email client Mozilla Thunderbird will save you time and hassle flicking between browser tabs and logins. Like Firefox, Thunderbird is an open source project published by the Mozilla Foundation, and is almost infinitely adaptable.

Thunderbird's standard features include an RSS reader and the ability to link to files too large to send as attachments, and its optional extras include weather forecasts and Google app tabs.

8. KeePass Password Safe

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Generate strong passwords for accounts and store them in a secure vault

There’s no shortage of free password managers, but KeePass Password Safe is our favorite open source option. It’s not flashy, but it’s packed with all the tools and features you could want, including AES encryption of your entire database of login details (not just the passwords themselves), two-factor authentication via both a master password and key file, and secure random password generation.

KeePass is tiny, and because it’s a portable program you can carry it on a USB stick, and thanks to an extensive library of plug-ins, it’s easy to integrate with your preferred browser and cloud storage provider.

9. FileZilla

If you run your own website, the chances are you'll need FTP software to upload files directly to your server. While there are some good existing FTP clients out there, FileZilla is probably the best free version you can use.

It does all that you need to with a file upload client, which remains relatively simple anyway. On the left pane, FileZilla presents you with a view of your folder selection (from Windows Explorer, if using Windows) where you can ensure you select your folder of files to upload - on the right, the pane shows your location on the server, which will be a similar-looking file tree.

You just need to ensure you click through the folders on the right pane to the place where you want to upload your files, such as within the Public_HTML folder on many Linux servers. Then it's simply a matter of using drag and drop to move your files to upload from the left pane and into the right pane.

Simple, easy, and usually very painless. The main stumbling block for most first-time users is not selecting the correct files to upload, or especially the correct locations.

If you need to CHMOD permissions for files, that's as easy as a right-click on any files or folders you need to apply them to, and that's about it.

10. Linux

It used to be the case that Linux was solely the preserve of geeks and code junkies - it made little attempt to appeal to a wide user base. Those days are long since over, and varieties of Linux have made a big effort to be a lot more user-friendly for people with little if anything coding knowledge, and present a serious rival to Windows and Apple Mac iOS as alternatives for running your desktop.

These efforts have helped to edge Linux toward the mainstream, as underlined by computer giant Dell moving to sell Linux desktops and laptops directly to the public. Better still, Windows remains the target of choice for hackers, so Linux presents itself as a more secure alternative, so long as you keep updates fresh.

Best Open Source Software For Business

Another problem from the old days is that most software applications were developed for Windows. However, the move toward cloud computing and browser-based applications means that it no longer matters which operating system you use for many popular applications, so if you're looking to run your computers for business rather than gaming purposes then much of the time Linux can be a perfectly valid choice.

Probably the biggest difficulty in moving to Linux these days is actually the choice available. Rather than being one operating system, Linux is actually a platform from which a number of different 'flavors' or 'distros' have developed and grown from. Although they all run from the same basic source code, each has been programmed to cater for different uses and emphasis - some are great for home use, others are focused on servers.

Whichever you want to look at, remember that you don't need to be stuck to any particular Linux flavor - you can uninstall any you don't like and install any you'd like to try. And if you need help making a decision, check out our reviews.

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Open-source software is also called as OSS, which is a computer software program designed and deployed with its source code made available and licensed with a free license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to an anonymous entity for any purpose. People using OSS can distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose because Open-source software is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open-source software is the most prominent example of open-source development and often compared to (technically defined) user-generated content or (legally defined) open-content movements.

The top Five reasons why individuals or organizations choose open source software are:

1) Lower cost,

2) Security,

3) No vendor ‘lock in’, and

4) Better quality

5) Transparency

The Open source code modification, redistribution of open-source software reserved under copyright holder according to copyright law. GNU General Public License (GPL), is a good example of it which allows free distribution under the same license for its free usage. Software licenses grant rights to users, which would otherwise be reserved by copyright law to the copyright holder. Among thousands of Open source software projects these 10 Open Source Softwares listed below are the most important and valuable. These are rare software product that has no alternatives and must require.

1) Linux kernel

The Linux kernel is a prominent example of free and open source software. It is a Unix-like operating system released under the GNU General Public License version (GPLv2). Linux wasn’t the first open source software project, but it was the powerful community developed by contributors worldwide. The Linux kernel is used by a variety of operating systems based on it, which are usually in the form of Linux distributions. The popularity of Linux Kernel rapidly accumulated developers and users who adopted code from other free software projects for use with the new operating system.

2) GNU Utilities and Compilers

The GNU Project is the flagship of the free software movement and Compiler Collection, which is also named as GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) which is developed by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), which is the source of an amazing variety of tools and utilities that, when combined with the Linux kernel, provide a complete operating system.

With the Linux kernel, the GNU utilities and the GNU Compiler Collection make up the holy trinity of the Linux world. As well as being the official compiler of the unfinished GNU operating system, GCC has been adopted as the standard compiler by most other modern Unix-like computer operating systems, including Linux and the BSD family. Versions are also available for Microsoft Windows and other operating systems. GCC is also available for most embedded platforms, including Symbian (called gcce),[6] AMCC, and Freescale Power Architecture-based chips. It is named the GNU C Compiler, because it only handled the C programming language and the compiler was extended to compile C++ in December of that year 1987.

3) Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system developed to increase usability and ease of use. Ubuntu is a free software and named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu (literally, “humanness”), which often is translated as “humanity towards others” or “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”. Ubuntu is the first choice of novice users and PC sellers because its free and no need to pay fees. The Ubuntu project is publicly committed to the principles of open source development; people are encouraged to use free software, study how it works, improve upon it, and distribute it.

According to some metrics, Ubuntu is the most popular desktop Linux distribution. Ubuntu comes installed with a wide range of software that includes LibreOffice, Firefox, Empathy, Transmission, and several lightweight games.

4) BSD Operating Systems

Linux isn’t the only popular free open source operating system, there are a number of Unix-like operating systems under active development, named behind BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution). Free BSD, Net BSD and OpenBSD are very famous examples of the BSDs.

FreeBSD is famous for superior reliability and performance. It’s a free Unix-like operating system developed by AT&T UNIX and has more than 200 active developers and thousands of contributors.

NetBSD is a freely redistributable, open source version of the Unix-derivative BSD, computer operating system notable for supporting a wide range of hardware platforms, including embedded systems and mobile devices. NetBSD is famous for its portability and quality of design and implementation, it is often used in embedded systems and as a starting point for the porting of other operating systems to new computer architectures.

OpenBSD is touted as perhaps the most secure Unix-like operating system, with a security audit that never stops. It includes a number of security features absent or optional in other operating systems and has a tradition of developing auditing the source code for software bugs and security problems.

5) Samba

Samba is Free Software licensed under the GNU General Public License, the Samba project is a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Samba is a free software re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol, originally developed by Andrew Tridgell. Samba bridges the gaps between Linux/Unix and Windows, allowing Unix and Linux servers to provide file and print services to Windows clients, and Linux and Unix clients work with Windows file servers. A Samba host can even serve as the primary domain controller for a Windows network. Samba provides file and print services for various Microsoft Windows clients and can integrate with a Windows Server domain, either as a Primary Domain Controller (PDC) or as a domain member. Samba is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The name Samba comes from the SMB (Server Message Block), the name of the standard protocol used by the Microsoft Windows network file system.

6) MySQL

The world’s most popular open source database with easy administration, excellent read performance, and transparent support for large text and binary objects make it the top choice for many Web sites. The MySQL development project has made its source code available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. It is a popular choice of database for use in web applications, and is a central component of the widely used LAMP open source web application acronym for “Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python.” Free-software-open source projects that require a full-featured database management system often uses MySQL. Applications which use MySQL databases include: TYPO3, MODx, Joomla, WordPress, phpBB, MyBB, Drupal and other software.

7) BIND

BIND is the most popular open source DNS (Domain Name System) server software on the Internet. It works on Unix-like operating systems, it is the de facto standard that implements DNS protocols for the Internet. The Berkeley Internet Name Domain package was originally written at the University of California at Berkeley. The software consists, most prominently, of the DNS server component, called contracted for name daemon. In addition the suite contains various administration tools, and a DNS resolver interface library. The latest version of BIND is BIND 9, first released in 2000.

8) Sendmail

Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility born before the Internet was standardized and supports different kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet. Sendmail served as the backbone of the Internet mail system throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It has lost ground to Postfix, Qmail, Exim, and Microsoft Exchange in recent years, but still ranks among the most popular MTAs (mail transfer agents). It is a well-known project of the free and open source software and Unix communities. It has spread both as free software and proprietary software.

Top Open Source Software Examples

9) OpenSSH and OpenSSL

OpenSSH

OpenSSH is an abbreviation of OpenBSD Secure Shell developed as part of the security conscious OpenBSD project. It is a set of computer programs providing encrypted communication sessions over the Internet using the SSH protocol. It was created as an open source alternative to the proprietary Secure Shell software suite offered by SSH Communications Security.

OpenSSL

OpenSSL is an open-source implementation software package uses strong cryptography. OpenSSH encrypts shell communications to remote computers, addressing the shortcomings in tools such as rlogin and telnet, which send usernames and passwords in clear text. OpenSSL is a software library that allows developers to incorporate SSL or TLS into their Internet applications. It was written in the C programming language, implements the basic cryptographic functions and provides various utility functions. The project is managed by a worldwide community of volunteers that use the Internet to communicate, plan, and develop the OpenSSL toolkit and its related documentation.

10) Apache

Top Open Source Software For Business

The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows. The Web server that puts the A in LAMP is still fast, flexible, and secure, with broad operating system and Web programming language support and hundreds of modules available to extend the functionality. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.

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Apache httpd has been the most popular web server on the Internet and generally used on a Unix-like system, the software is available for a wide variety of operating systems, including Unix, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Novell NetWare, OS X, Microsoft Windows, OS/2, TPF, OpenVMS and eComStation. Released under the Apache License, Apache is open-source software.