whdb.com — It's not the price of the software that makes the real difference (although it's a reason to migrate from one software to another for many people); it's the idea that proprietary software comes with boundaries that keep the user experience confined to... well, being the user. Here are 50 commonly used programs that have open source alternatives.
Feb 7, 2008 View in Crawl 4
fjc8Feb 9, 2008
It doesn't really play Blu-ray titles. It plays the video/audio streams from Blu-ray titles, which is good enough to watch the movie. The actual video stream is MPEG2, VC-1, or H264; the audio data is LPCM, Dolby Digital (traditional or Plus), DTS (regular or HD), or one of a few various lossless compression formats. There are open source implementations of all of the video formats and many of the audio formats.
krahzeeFeb 9, 2008
Well when you are trying to impress upon the uneductated that openoffice contains all of these, it may get lost. Hell, I know quite a few uneducated users who didn't know office contained excel, word, etc...
gawtmilkFeb 9, 2008
It is stealing. I still do it, but how is it NOT stealing?They charge $799.99 for it. You don't pay them, yet end up with their product. The thing being "stolen" is the sale.
sirhomerFeb 10, 2008
You mean all the stupid artsy Photoshop designers are all pirates? Who would have known. Well at least the programming profession hasn't been corrupted by retards who only know how to use one tool.
grumpyrainFeb 10, 2008
How exactly? I have ABP and NoScript. Firefox + digg story with hundreds of comments = 100% CPU for 30 seconds. (This happens with a clean FF without extensions as well). You have your head in the sand if you deny that. The idea that this is configuration based is ignorant.
blatantninjaFeb 11, 2008
Agreed. Getting a wireless card to work on Ubuntu practically takes an act of God.
thezorchFeb 24, 2008
I use many of these apps on my Windows and Linux installs. They are all excellent, I don't miss their proprietary counterparts one bit because I'm not loosing any functionality using an open source product. That's the misconception many people have about FOSS, they have this "idea" (perpetuated by Microsoft mostly) that FOSS apps aren't as good as the proprietary commercial software they mimic. This isn't true, at least not anymore. GIMP for instance has really grown up over the past few years and is now an extremely powerful graphics tool. Firefox is swiftly becoming the #1 most used web browser on the net, and this is due to the fact that it is not vulnerable to Active X hacks which is the #1 method by which malicious software finds it way onto your PC via IE. And then there is OpenOffice.org, I used to use MS Office all the time but when I found this I started using it and never looked back since. FOSS has matured into apps that are usable and powerful enough to challenge proprietary software.As for Linux, I use Ubuntu 7.10 for everyday computing and Windows for those games which Wine doesn't support .... a list which is swiftly shrinking by the way.
fraggedFeb 28, 2008
Tis hard to define, as stealing usually consists of somebody else losing something. In this case, nobody is losing anything unless you would buy the software if you couldnt obtain it elsewhere.The question is, why the f**k areyou being dugg down? your statement is legitimate. Digg is just full of tards.
fraggedFeb 28, 2008
Ha. You think we are going to believe you without any citation?I've heard about this with the music industry, but never software companies. But do you think its big news? If so, heres a news break companies stay afloat and bring out software BECAUSE THE SOFTWARE MAKES THEM MONEY. They in turn pay the devs. making money in many cases isn't about how smart or good you are at what you do, but having money.
dingedarmorAug 31, 2011
Hm, the Vista vs ubuntu shows how old this is. Windows 7 works great and for fun I play with Mint on Virtual box.