Saugus.net: Some Free Software

A Guide To Free Software

This page is meant to serve as a guide to free (and almost free) software. For those unfamiliar with the concept of free software, one of the first thoughts might be "Sure, you get what you pay for...". In the case of free software, this is not true. There are numerous free software packages maintained by people who do it for the love of the science. There are also numerous free software packages maintained by universities and various educational facilities. There are even free software packages maintained by non-profit organizations set up for the purpose of creating, maintaining, and distributing free software (the most important of these is the Free Software Foundation headquartered right in Cambridge; their site is a good visit with lots of information on the principle of free and open source software). In all of these cases free software packages are often better than similar commercial versions costing hundreds of dollars. In most cases the maintainers of free software are also users, so they have good reason to keep the software bug free. The next question might be "Why haven't I heard of them before?" The answer is that since they are free, they don't spend money on advertising -- it is not a reflection on their quality.

In any case, the Internet is full of freeware, shareware, and software that is available for just the cost of the media, shipping, & handling. Other variants exist, too; some software authors provide their software freely but request that users make a donation to a particular charity. Other authors just request that users send them a postcard or a coin from their local area. Other variants (like crippleware & nagware) also exist.

This page will focus primarily on high quality freeware. If you know of something that we're missing, please let us know by . You may also find our Saugus.net open source software collection to be of interest.

Operating Systems

The first stop in obtaining free software is picking up an OS. Sure, your computer probably came with one pre-installed, but it was hardly for free -- typical pre-installed OSes actually cost you well over $100 in the machine purchase price. Plus, the free OSes are often more capable than the ones pre-installed. Finally, unlike some of the commercial OSes still being purchased, the free OSes are all Y2K clean. What do you do? Either request one of the free OSes be pre-installed when you initially buy your computer, or follow the instructions on your computer's software agreement to get a refund for the price of your pre-installed OS prior to using your computer. The following are some free (or nearly free) OSes:

FreeBSD: A free variant of Berkeley's UNIX, FreeBSD is similar to Linux in many respects and typical users would have trouble spotting the differences. Its advocates would argue that it has a better design than Linux, however; Linux advocates would argue that it is not as well supported. Regardless, FreeBSD currently only supports x86 and Alpha platforms (although rumor is a SPARC port is underway).
See also: http://www.freebsd.org/
FreeDOS: FreeDOS is an MS-DOS (or DR-DOS or PC-DOS) work-alike. It is one of the very few free OSes not inspired by UNIX. It runs on x86 systems.
See also: http://freedos.sourceforge.net/,
http://www.freedos.org/

Browsers

One of the most useful things to put on any machine is a browser. After all, much of the documentation for free software is available online on the web! Fortunately, there is a bevy of free browsers available.

Firefox: Essentially a lightweight version of Mozilla optimized for browsing, Firefox is quickly becoming one of the most popular browsers in use today. It is known for being fast, secure, and feature rich, and it runs on most OSes.
See also: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/,
http://gnusto.mozdev.org/,
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/,
http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/,
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/,
http://www.newtonslibrary.org/nbrdr/,
http://earth-api-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/helloearth/
Flock: Flock is basically a version of Firefox optimized to work with various online resources including blogs. It is available for Linux, recent versions of MS-Windows, and Mac OS X.
See also: http://www.flock.com/developer/,
http://www.flock.com/

Multimedia Applications

While multimedia is somewhat of an ill-defined term, it will be used here to cover applications that are capable of handling a combination of media types, especially video.

Flash: Macromedia offers a free Flash Player application with relatively current versions for Linux, Mac OS, Windows '95 / '98, and Windows NT. It also offers Flash Player and Flash Generator source code to facilitate free porting to other platforms.
See also: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/licensing/,
http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/

Games

One of the most popular types of applications for computers, games entertain both the computer novice and pro alike. Not all games are expensive; some of the best available can be found for free.

Freeciv: A Civilization II play-alike that will run under most UNIX-like systems, Win '95/'98, OS/2, and AmigaOS.
See also: http://www.freeciv.org/
Frets on Fire: A music game for most Unix-like systems, Mac OS X, and some versions of MS-Windows.
See also: http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/

Collections

Some sites offer collections of software rather than a particular program, and this Free Software Guide would not be complete if it omitted them.

Freshmeat: A large collection of software for UNIX type systems. The focus is on open source software; quality level varies tremendously, so the downloader should be a little wary.
See also: http://www.freshmeat.net/

More coming soon...

The above list should get you started. More will be coming soon; we'll be adding in some games plus a few general sites offering all manner of software. What else would you like to see? Don't be afraid to let us know and we'll try and add it to the list.