I wanted to share some sites I know that give free open source versions of popular and expensive software. Want MS Office or Adobe Photoshop but don’t want to pay the steep price? These programs are free and many of them work just as good, if not better.

Open Office is a suit of programs that is meant to be comparable to Microsoft Office. It has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation builder and many other features. I have used some of the features on this product (mainly the spreadsheet and the word processor) and can say that they are very good. They don’t have every feature you get with office, but they also don’t cost a dime which is a very good price. I use this on a second computer I have that I didn’t want to buy another copy of Office for.

Another cool site is OSALT. This site lists many different free open source versions of various programs. They have open source versions of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and many others. I use a video editing program they suggested and works very well. Again, all of these programs are open source projects so they are free. This software is very good, is regularly upgraded and has some great documentation including, in many cases, an entire community of people using it and posting in forums answering each other’s questions. 

Whether you are building a second computer and don’t want to drop 1000’s of dollars on new software or you just want something new and cool and don’t want to have to pay for it, these two sites will give you a ton of great tools to help you run your business smoothly.