Open Source Software

Mozilla Thunderbird is the awesome email counterpart to the ever popular Mozilla Firefox browser. Mozilla has once again created a great, free, open source emailing client. It has built in learning capabilities to combat spam, and can handle multiple email accounts. Aside from that, the Mozilla community also creates addons for Thunderbird, just like they do for Firefox. This means you can extend the already great functionality of the Thunderbird email client to fit more of your personal needs.

Adobe Air is the new buzz in the application world as it allows for developers to design their applications around one framework, instead of having to port their program to many platforms. Adobe Air applications are usually fairly small, and most update themselves automatically when needed. Overall it is a pretty solid piece of software, and if you check out the applications that are out there for it, you will see what the buzz is all about.

Open Office is the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, and does a great job of competing with it's commercial rival. You can open most, if not all Microsoft documents in Open Office with minimal formatting errors, and even save documents in Microsoft formats that open up pretty well in Office. Open Office also comes with a word processor like Microsoft Word, a spreadsheet component like Microsoft Excel, and a presentation component like Microsoft Powerpoint. Open Office even comes with a drawing component that has some nice options to create your own digital art. The only thing Open Office seems to lack right now is database capability like Microsoft Access, but not everyone needs that anyway.

Wordpress is probably the most well known, and most popular blogging platforms in the world today. There are millions of blogs that currently use Wordpress for their website. Wordpress has come a long way since it's creation, and also has a large development community behind it. There are more plugins being created these days that are taking Wordpress to the next level, and actually making it more of a CMS in the traditional sense. Out of the box, it is still just a powerful blogging platform, but with a few good plugins, you can have yourself an E-commerce store, a solid forum, or a community driven website like Reddit, Flicker, or Reddit. I wouldn't say it is as powerful as Drupal, but it is a quite a bit more user friendly at this point.

Mozilla Firefox is by far one of the most preferred browsers on the planet at this point, especially within the development community as it has tons of add-ons that will blow your mind. Once again, the open-source community shines through with a huge community behind these addons, and some see hundreds of thousands of downloads per day. If Firefox isn't the most popular browser right now, within 10 years it probably will.