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.

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.

iCab: Currently available only for Mac OS (both PowerPC and 68K versions) and Mac OS X, iCab is a fairly solid browser that does many things well and a few things poorly. It has both free and commercial versions.
See also: http://www.icab.de/download.html

Graphics Applications

Ranging from simple drawing programs to full-featured 3D image manipulation systems, graphics applications fill diverse needs including: presentations, modeling, animations, etc.

ImageMagick: ImageMagick is similar to GraphicsMagick; it provides sophisticated image controls and impressive special effects capabilities for computer graphics work. It is available for pretty much every UNIX-like OS, Windows NT, Windows '95 / '98, and Mac OS.
See also: http://www.imagemagick.org/
Inkscape: Inkscape is a scalable vector graphics editor, that is, an application more similar to Illustrator or CorelDraw than Photoshop. It is available for most UNIX-like OSes, most flavors of MS-Windows, and Mac OS X.
See also: http://www.inkscape.org/

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.

IF-Archive: Hundreds of interactive fiction files to use with XZip or similar players.
See also: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive.html

Programming

A great deal of free software has been created to assist in programming. Whole software development environments are available as well as programming languages and simple frameworks to help one get a jump-start on a particular task.

Inform: Everything needed to develop Inform applications is freely downloadable and available for most flavors of UNIX, most flavors of MS-Windows, Mac OS, OS/2, all flavors of DOS, Amiga, BeOS, and more.
See also: http://www.inform-fiction.org/,
http://www.inform-fiction.org/inform6.html

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.