The Open Source Community

	Friday September 10, 2010

Evolution (Linux, Solaris) is the world's most popular personal and workgroup information management solution. The software seamlessly integrates email, calendaring, contact management, and task lists, in one easy-to-use application. Evolution is powerful collaboration software that connects to popular corporate communications architectures like Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise, and other messaging systems.

Gnumeric (GNOME) spreadsheet is part of the GNOME desktop environment: a project to create a free, user friendly desktop environment. As every other component of GNOME, Gnumeric is free software (Some other people like to call this OpenSource software) and it is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Gnumeric is intended to be a drop in replacement for proprietary spreadsheets. We are not attempting to clone existing applications. However, we offer a customizable feel that attempts to minimize the costs of transition.

KOffice (KDE) is an office suite developed to integrate into the K desktop environment. It comprises a number of applications; KWord is a fully featured word processing package that enables documents to be viewed in outline; KCalc is a spreadsheet application; KPresent is a fully featured presentation program; Kivio is a Visio-style flow charting application; Karbon14 is used to create vector drawings; Krita is a raster-based image manipulation program like The Gimp or Adobe Photoshop; Kugar is a reporting tool; KChart is an integrated charting and graphing tool; KFormula is used for editing formulae.

Notepad ++ (Linux, Windows) Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment. This project, based on the Scintilla edit component (a very powerful editor component), written in C++ with pure win32 api and STL (that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program), is under the GPL Licence.

OpenOffice.org (Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD, Solaris) is both an Open Source product and a project. The product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office.

Available in 25 languages with more being constantly added by the community. OpenOffice.org runs stably and natively on Solaris, Linux (including PPC Linux), and Windows. Additional ports, such as for FreeBSD, IRIX, and Mac OS X, are in various stages of completion.

Written in C++ and with documented APIs licensed under the LGPL and SISSL Open Source licenses, OpenOffice.org allows any knowledgeable developer to benefit from the source. And, because the file format for OpenOffice.org is XML, interoperability is easy, making future development and adoption more certain.

Scribus (KDE) is a Page Layout program for GNU/Linux®, similar to Adobe® PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe® InDesign, except that it is published under the GNU GPL.

Scribus offers support for professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, sophisticated "press-ready" PDF creation, EPS and PDF import/export and creation of color separations and optionally very complete ICC color management - thanks to littlecms, the first for an open source application.

Stellarium (Linux, Mac, Windows) Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.