Superior free software?

March 15, 2005 11:18 PM

What examples are there of consumer-grade open source software whose quality surpasses that of closed source, proprietary software?

I am a part of Florida Free Culture, a chapter of FreeCulture.org at the University of Florida. We're planning a project where students bring their laptops in, we rid them of spyware and viruses, and install free alternatives to programs they often use. The biggest example of this kind of software is Mozilla Firefox.

I am looking for other examples of open source and free (as in speech) software that are better than their closed-source counterparts. I'd appreciate examples for any operating system, but most students use Microsoft Windows.

posted by pealco to Computers & Internet (24 answers total)

What about the canon: apache, gcc, emacs, (la)TeX, csound, LAMP tools...most IT professionals I know consider Nagios the best at what it does...hmm I guess only the first batch makes sense for laptops, got carried away :)

By the way, you may be playing a little fast and loose with "free". I thought of a couple great "zero-cost" programs that aren't open source.
posted by freebird at 11:34 PM on March 15, 2005

Thanks, Freebird. Yeah, sometimes it's hard to explain the difference between free libre and free gratis, especially since libre is so often gratis. I'm aware of the difference, and we're only interested in libre.
posted by pealco at 11:51 PM on March 15, 2005

Kerio Personal Firewall -- get it and use it. I'm a big fan of the text editor SciTE. Cygwin is a great tool set, but that's not something you install for someone else. Mp3BookHelper is a great tagging program, with a plethora of features including regular expressions. CDex makes ripping CDs easy. Chatzilla's all I need for IRC. CutePDFWriter (along with Ghostscript) transparently takes care of producing PDFs. Startup Control Panel is a must have for MS-Windows users. Open Office does what MS Office does, and sometimes more cleanly too. GIMP, erm, works if you don't have something better. Real Alternative finally made using Real streams something I didn't avoid like the plague. CLCL Ver 1.1.1 WEB SITE: http://www.nakka.com/ is a must have. Proxomitron makes the web ad free. CookieCop makes a great backup to Proxomitron. True X-Mouse isn't for everyone, but is worth a look. MacroMaker is unobtrusive and very very stable -- I only use it for one thing, but I'd be in pain with out it. Call Trace by Arash Ramin is wonderful if you have caller id and a modem. Mozilla Thunderbird is still klunky, but works in some situations where MS-Outlook fails. Postgresql's a real and solid database. Filezilla's a solid ftp program.
posted by orthogonality at 12:06 AM on March 16, 2005

Media Player Classic for playing movie files and DVDs.

CDex for ripping CDs to mp3 (seconded).

Image Magick. If you just want to crop/convert images for web pages, it's fantastic. Though the command line may put some people off, it is sometimes far more convenient than Photoshop and doesn't cost a fortune.
posted by Gary at 12:10 AM on March 16, 2005

Gaim is a fantastic chat client (don't forget your private chat plugin).

Password Safe is a great solution for storing and managing passwords securely.
posted by Caviar at 12:12 AM on March 16, 2005

I'm guessing the key phrase here is "consumer-grade." The Free Software community has produced a ton of phenomenal tools for developers and scientists, but the fact is that the majority of open source desktop applications for Joe User are a bit rough around the edges (poor interface design, steep learning curve, etc.).

There are a couple of projects like GNUWin that are worth looking into. But if you look hard at the list of applications, relatively few can honestly be considered better than proprietary counterparts. MPlayer stands out in that list--it's a real swiss army knife of media software. LAME is generally regarded as the best mp3 encoder available.

Filesharing is one area where open source shines, if only because there is so much crap embedded in all the for-profit clients. MLdonkey is a solid client capable of interfacing with multiple networks.
posted by Galvatron at 12:14 AM on March 16, 2005

Let's have a look in my Applications directory on this here Macintosh, shall we?

Adium -- along with Fire -- for superior IM
Azureus is the P2P app of the gods
Audacity is an excellent audio editor and compares favorably to just about everything short of SoundForge itself.
Cabos is a free Gnutella client.
Camino is far better than just about all closed-source browsers except perhaps OmniWeb, which has that horrible horrible tab system. But then, Camino's tabs suck, too.
gvim is the editor of the gods, although I've been drifting away from it lately for casual editing.
Handbrake is a better DVD to movie file converter than any commercial product. In fact the commercial products in this space are almost all crap.
Heidrun is a lot nicer than the closed source Hotline client.
MacTheRipper is merely gratis but still worth mention as excellent.
MplayerOSX beats the pants off any closed-source movie player; Quicktime Player is weak by comparison, and it shames Windows Media Player for Macintosh (yes, that's really its name) for every use but WM3-encoded files.
Notational Velocity is better than every other piece of software ever written.
Quicksilver is widely considered to be superior to the closed-source, commercial LaunchBar. I don't agree with the masses, and ponied up for LaunchBar, but hey, software libre!
VLC swats the bejeezus out of equivalent nonfree products.
X-Chat Aqua is vastly superior to all other Macintosh IRC clients, some of which are closed-source commercial products that still suck.
posted by majick at 1:10 AM on March 16, 2005

Personally, I'd put linux itself and KDE in there as well.
posted by salmacis at 2:25 AM on March 16, 2005

these days, open office is "as good as" word, at least at my user level (basic). if i were you'd i'd stick openoffice on there (but get the latest version - it improve a lot after release 1.0).
posted by andrew cooke at 2:33 AM on March 16, 2005

Audacity is an excellent audio editor and compares favorably to just about everything short of SoundForge itself.

Sorry, but Audacity is rubbish compared to CoolEdit 2000 (now called Adobe Audition) which, sadly, is commercial.

Not one to go on pealco's list I'm afriad.
posted by ralawrence at 3:53 AM on March 16, 2005

"Yeah, sometimes it's hard to explain the difference between free libre and free gratis, especially since libre is so often gratis. I'm aware of the difference, and we're only interested in libre."

I'm not aware of the difference. Can someone fill me in?
posted by nthdegx at 4:48 AM on March 16, 2005

While I don't have enough experience with other accounting programs to say if it's better, I've been using gnucash for years and always been happy with it. It's great for simple checkbook balancing, as well as a plethora of more complex accounting stuff.
posted by abingham at 4:55 AM on March 16, 2005

"free" is a rather ambigious word so people sometimes use "libre" to indicate that the application gives you freedoms (such as to view the code, modify it and potentially re-distribute your modifications) and "gratis" to indicate that you simply don't have to pay anything for it.

Kazaa is a "gratis" application, Firefox is a "libre" application.
posted by ralawrence at 4:58 AM on March 16, 2005

One of the best examples out there you'll find is Snort which does intrusion detection. There are hundreds of tools, front-ends, back-ends, and plug-ins for it, developed by a huge community. The signatures (akin to virus detection if you're unfamiliar with Intrusion Detection) are collaborated on by thousands of users with different needs, resulting in a far more robust ruleset than some of the commecial Intrusion Detection Products, like Cisco's Secure IDS or Realsecure's ISS.

A google will give you an idea of how many people work on code related in some way to Snort.
posted by poppo at 5:20 AM on March 16, 2005

And, whoops...just re-read your post and realized you're really looking for sort of end user desktop stuff
posted by poppo at 5:21 AM on March 16, 2005

You can get chipset-optimized versions of Thunderbird and Firefox at moox. IME, much more responsive and stable.
posted by signal at 7:39 AM on March 16, 2005

Apache is pretty much the only thing I've used that doesn't feel home-made. Possibly PHP. Firefox is awful in this regard.
posted by cillit bang at 7:54 AM on March 16, 2005

SpyBot duhh.
As mentioned, EAC or CDex for ripping.
LAME MP3 encoding either called from EAC or using the multi-frontend, or All2lame frontend.
I'd vote winamp over Foobar 2000 for the casual user.
Irfanview for basic image viewing, resizing, not editing.
There are tons of nice FTP programs, I like Filezilla.
posted by Jack Karaoke at 7:55 AM on March 16, 2005

The aforementioned gaim, WinScp, and PuTTY.

Perhaps also CoLinux .
posted by jba at 8:22 AM on March 16, 2005

Firefox is the only free "libre" product I know of that comes close to being better than a commercial product, and even so I would only recommend it on Windows or perhaps Linux, because it's so ugly on the Mac. The other "libre" end-user software I've seen all has serious UI deficiencies. Contrary to popular belief, which holds that free software developers rarely get within spitting distance of regular end users, I believe that free software developers do often get within spitting distance of regular end users, and then develop atrocious UI as a way of spitting on them.
posted by kindall at 8:39 AM on March 16, 2005

I think wxMusik is better than ITunes. Others will miss the convenience of DRM, brushed metal looks, and strange folder paths.
posted by 31d1 at 8:59 AM on March 16, 2005

You are asking for "examples of open source and free (as in speech) software that are better than their closed-source counterparts" so by default I will have to say all open-source software is better because it grants me the freedom to do with it as I please (within the confines of the license.) The commonly labelled "closed-source" software offers me no such freedom.

As far as the quality of the software, ease of use, features, lack of bugs, etc, that's all subjective, isn't it?
posted by raster at 2:05 PM on March 16, 2005

Jack Karaoke, the poster was asking about open-source software. Irfanview, EAC and SpyBot may be free, but they're not open source.

My suggestions:

Psi is one of the best Jabber clients around. Jabber, of course, supports connecting to other networks such as AIM and MSN. Windows, Linux, OS X.

Foobar2000 is one of the best audio players for Windows. It's not 100% open source, but most of it is.

VNC for connecting to other people's desktops. On Windows, the best version is probably UltraVNC. Windows; on Linux and OS X there are other clients and servers that are easy to find.

7-Zip is probably the best open-source archiver. Suppots ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, Gzip, Bzip2, and its own format, 7z. (Windows only.)

RSSOwl is a good cross-platform feed reader.

X-Chat is a decent IRC client. Windows and Linux.
posted by gentle at 2:25 PM on March 16, 2005

all open-source software is better because it grants me the freedom to do with it as I please

Depends on what you please. I can do what I please with Adobe Photoshop, since the things I want to do with it will never require the source code.
posted by kindall at 2:56 PM on March 16, 2005