Freedom and lots of it. All for the cost of the download.

Following on from the 4th of July those Wacky Americans and their immigrants were celebrating that all-day festival for freedom and those switched on and informed chaps at DL.TV have been listing many useful tools and applications all available for free and without the nags and time limits.

At this point I really wanted to embed the Video from the show; but they dont appear to provide a suitable link so here it is in all its url glory: http://dl.tv/2007/07/episode_179_freebie_software_t_1.php

Get some time to add this show to your respective RSS Feed for later viewing because, unlike BBC Click, these guys seem to have a balanced view on all platforms and content. What really impressed me though was the amount of tools they discussed which I have been using for quite some time.
Open Office
As an alternative to MS Office, with the exception of MS Access, the Open Office suite has been the main stay of my business for several years now. Its getting easier to promote this to other clients as well since the download and use along side MS Office enables clients to just get on and work without the whole hunt for the registration key efforts that usuall accompany installing MS office. Oh and its ability to read and write to Microsoft word and Excel and Powerpoint is of course a small bonus considering that I would rather send the Open Office Document and a link then ask the person to download the application to read the data file. This is already something people do to read PDF and Zip files so why not download OpenOffice to read my document file format ! Did I mention that Open Office also runs on Windows, Linux and OSX

VLC
An incredibly flexible and smart video player application that has handled more content via more networks with a simple interface than any other video playback application that I have ever used, yes its another Windows, Linux application.

Foxit Reader
If you want to read a 80Kb Adobe PDF File , should you have to download a 20Mb application file to access it. Especially if that application keeps requiring Mbs of update every few weeks. Foxit reader is far smaller , less than 2Mb and doesnt nag and run every few weeks.

AVG Antivirus
Now this Antivirus product is only free if you are a Home user however its price to business is so incredibly cheap and like the other products it wont nag you and harass you with huge downloads every few weeks.

Firefox
This browser that is becoming so synonymous with surfing the internet amongst my own clients and contacts that I rarely see Internet explorer being opened. There really is not much more to add except to wish the mozilla team great success in the 3.0 release.

One product they missed thoug was an alternative to Project Manager from Microsoft.

OpenWorkbench
Theres not much in software that I have seen impress even my Dad but receiving an email in which he proclaims “Open Source Rules” shows that we are making more headway in the open source is a credible replacement meme. Ive not had a play with this product yet however the testimonials on the site and from my Father would be enough for me to recommend it.

If you have any other recommendations or free software suggestion for the Windows world then let me know and I will try to update the post later this week.

Thanks for reading.