OpenOffice.org is (was?) an amazing, free alternative to Microsoft Office, that was originally developed by Sun Microsystems. If the geeky details don’t excite you, what all this means is that instead of being a corporation’s neglected project, the legal groundwork is being set so that enthusiastic volunteers can develop the project according to the needs of the community.
While OpenOffice had a successful development track record, it was also the code base for Sun’s StarOffice so features were broadly developed to serve that goal.
From now on, though, OpenOffice’s development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers.
Driving home the changes, OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice.
Oracle, meanwhile, has been humiliatingly invited to re-join the OpenOffice community by applying to the Foundation. It’s also been asked to donate the OpenOffice.org brand that it owns to the community. —Register
Other examples of amazing free tools, developed by volunteers and given
away for free, include GIMP (replacement for PhotoShop), Blender3D (game design platform and 3D modeling program… I sadly miss spending time with this tool) , Inform7 (“You see a text adventure game here!”), and Firefox.
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Representing the Humanities at Accepted Students Day.
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How could I forget Audacity!?
I'd add the sound recording and editing software Audacity to your list of open/free software. Easy to do simple things, and can do quite complex multi-tracking and processing.
Puredata is an open source visual programming language for creating sound processing applications. Immensely powerful but a steepish learning curve.
I think LibreOffice will be around for many years as it is a cornerstone application in most desktop Linux distributions. There is always LaTeX and Lyx...
Thank you for the clarification on OpenOffice. I'm a happy user of it. I'm going to hold off downloading the beta version.