Free Alternatives

This post is quite random I think....

Well.. Recently, Microsoft has announced that Windows Vista will have even more restrictions.

For one, they will not be allowing it to run in a virtualised environment for the Home and Home Premium Editions which I think would form the majority of the market.

As many know, Microsoft hasWindows Genuine Advantage (WGA) programme which caused some privacy concerns. Now, according to an business technology site, InformationWeek , a new programme called the Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) has been launched. (source)
As published in InformationWeek, and I quote: "Beginning Friday, users of Office XP and 2003 must prove to Microsoft that their software is legitimate to download add-ons from the Office Web site. "OGA only gets invoked then," said Jaidka. To download a template, for instance, requires that the user validate Office."

Though I aren't affected by this ruling since I invested my allowance on their software... $400 bucks for Office XP..., it has nonetheless got me thinking about the future of using such proprietary software...

I've been slowly but surely, migrating to opensource (OSS) and freeware once I feel that my software has become outdated than their respective freeware and OSS competition...

Looking through, I was actually able to sorted some of the more actively used softwares on my computer into a few categories....

Online

Filezilla,
Firefox,
Thunderbird,
Opera,
Internet Explorer 7 (To test my websites and visit sites built with ASP - Active Server Pages )

Compression

Izarc,
Zip Genius,
KGB Archiver

Development and Graphics

Inkscape,
Visual Studio Express,
OpenOffice.org,
GIMP,
Picasa

Server and virtualisation

VMware Player,
VMX wizard,
Apache

Maintenance and Security

Starter,
FreeRamXP pro,
EULA analyzer,
AntiVIR,
ZoneAlarm,
Spybot Serach and Destroy,
Ad-Aware

Media

VideoLan,
Audacity

LOLx... Welcome to the world of OSS and freeware I guess... haha...