Here is the first paragraph from Wikipedia’s entry about open source software:
- Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the production and design process for various goods, products, resources and technical conclusions or advice. The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is made available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create user-generated software content through incremental individual effort or through collaboration.
- Here is the link to the aforementioned article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSource
What this means is that it is free (usually) and you can even download the source code to make changes if you want to. I use many open source and/or freeware apps in my ministry. Here’s the breakdown:
1. Those used on Sunday morning in and for our worship service:
- Opensong – A free worship projection program. (www.opensong.org)
- Free Hi-Q – Software used to record messages to mp3 , A paid for version is also available with many advanced features.(http://www.RoemerSoftware.com)
- ITunes – digital music management program for playing music and burning cds of messages (www.apple.com)
- Audacity – A fantastic, free digital audio editor. (audacity.sourceforge.net)
2. Those used for study, message prep, organization, and graphics.
- OpenOffice – A Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Access alternative. (www.openoffice.org)
- Evernote – I LOVE this app, it is a note-taking application with plug-ins for FireFox and Outlook. It allows you to categorize and organize to your hearts content. I’m buying the pro version to get syncing capability and to support further development.
- Several Bible Study programs
- E-Sword – This is my personal favorite- (many free translations are available and you can purchase others) www.e-sword.net
This is freeware not Open Source. Macros are available for pasting into Word & Powerpoint. - The Sword Project – Haven’t used this one much but looks pretty good.
- Online Bible – This would be my second choice next to E-Sword. For you programmer types there is a COM object exposed so you can create VBA macros for Microsoft Word. This is freeware not Open Source.
- E-Sword – This is my personal favorite- (many free translations are available and you can purchase others) www.e-sword.net
3. Graphics
- GIMP – A great photoshop alternative. (www.gimp.org)
- Scribus – A page layout program (think Pagemaker, Publisher, QuarkXpress, or InDesign). It has some really powerful features but still seems quite buggy on the Win platform and some less than intuitive ways of doing things. (http://www.scribus.net)
4. Internet applications
- Joomla – A content management system for great database driven websites!
- nVu – A nice html/xhtml editor.
- FileZilla – A good ftp client.
- XAMPP – An all in one webserver setup, I use it to develop our church website on my local machine before posting to our Web host’s server.
- Juice – A great podcast catcher.
- Windows Live Writer – A microsoft program for posting to your blog, I’m using it right now! to write this post.
There are others but these are my “everyday applications” . Most of these ask for a small donation if possible to help support further development but all are free to use. More on these programs later.
Blessings!
Gregg
