To continue in the spirit of my last blog entry, I thought it might be interesting to share with you the list of my favorite free software that I’m using. I’m using some of the listed tools on a daily basis (some of them even right now, while writing this blog entry!), others less often but when I need them, they’re nevertheless essential for me. I would also like to emphasize on word free – I don’t want to exclude free, but at the same time closed source software from the list. I’m not OSS purist, I’m well aware of the legal as well as business constraints in some cases, due to which, original authors decided to give us free software without giving away source code. When I’m looking for a tool, I always prefer an open source program over a closed source one. Only when I can’t find good open source application (usually under GPL license) I settle for closed one.

So, here is the List of my favorite free software. It’s not a final compilation of my free software tools by any means – rather than trying to write it down in one hop, I’ll add categories and items as time goes by.

Last but not least, a fair warning:

• I’m not the person to contact if you have question about particular tool,
• don’t expect from me to help you install particular tool or give you an advice on how to use it,
• if you think you know a better tool for the particular task, you can let me know and if I found it good, I’ll include the item on the list with appropriate credit.