Open Source Software is free to use software that has been released into the community by a company or by an group of individuals who have worked at developing software that is free to own and use, usually Open Source Software is provided so that you can make changes to the source code, to extend it's functionality or make modifications. Any changes you make are usually made available to the community, that is you and me, to use the enhancements.
Why do people create or work on open source software? Well a lot of people believe that the best things in life are free, others wish to contribute to "world" and they do this in a practical non selfish manner by helping others in this way. Some people simply feel their is too much commercialization and greed in the software industry and wish to counteract that by providing software for free. Whatever reason people have to work on providing free software it is certainly a good thing for many people. There is no real reason why anyone should steal and use commercial pirated software when there exists a range of free quality software you can download for nothing.
On this page I will add some of the software I have found useful, you possibly already know or have heard of this software, you may just find some hidden jems that you did not know exisits. This page also exists to provide me an online bookmark of software I use, or may wish to investigate and learn about in the future.
This website is mainly developed using WordPress - an open source authoring and "blogging" software. The software allows you to write articles and pages, while allowing comments by visitors. I personally have comments switched off as over 78% of all comments tend to be spam. WordPress look and feel is managed by templates and you can download thousands of free templates or purchase professional or paid for versions, often at less than $40 (£20). If you want a unique look and feel for your website using WordPress you can also pay a web designed to create a template that is just for you. You can pay a few hundred dollars to several thousand depending on your requirements. When I get time I hope to start creating my own web templates and providing them as Open Source as this can be a useful way of letting others know that your website exists!
Visit WordPress.org - http://wordpress.org/ to learn more or to download the software. You will need a website that has MySQL database and runs php to be able to install and run this software.
If you are into creating your own website then you will have heard of Dreamweaver, InDesign and other Adobe products. You may also have used Microsoft Frontpage to create your website. Many people prefer using Open Source and one free web development package is called Nvu and you can learn more about this software on the Nvu forum. It was released way back in 2005 and has some noticable bugs so you may prefer to look at the unofficial release called KompoZer that works better with CSS and has some of the annoying bugs removed.
If you have a website that has open source or shareware at a reasonable price and would like mentioned then just e-mail me (Richard) at contact [at] visitandlearn.com and I will see what I can do.