SCL 2

What is open source software ?

Open source refers to a program or software in which the source code  is available to the general public for use or modification from its original design free of charge.

In your opinion , why people prefer open source software over proprietry alternatives nowadays ?

 In my opinion , people prefer  for open source because open source is based on a simple and easy to understand than proprietry  . And the other is proprietry is someone else asset .So , if we want to use it , we have to pay for every software that we use .

List top 5 most popular open source software and compare them with similar proprietry software . 

Abiword vs Microsoft Word
http://www.abisource.com/
Abiword good replacement for Word. It’s lightweight (meaning it runs quickly) and includes pretty much every feature that can use regularly in a word processor, plus it can save files in formats that you can exchange with Word and WordPerfect users, plus open any of their files, too.

OpenOffice vs Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint
http://www.openoffice.org/
It includes very nice replacements for Excel and PowerPoint. It actually prefer their Excel and PowerPoint replacements to the real thing.

 GIMPShop vs Adobe Photoshop
http://www.gimpshop.net/
This is a version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program that does a pretty solid job of imitating Adobe Photoshop – a regular user of Photoshop  can adapt to it quite quickly. It’s very richly featured and runs quite well – in fact, I see no reason to ever go back, even if Photoshop were free.

VLC Media Player vs Windows Media Player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
If you get tired of having tons of media players on your computer, get this package that runs pretty much every media type you’ll run across without breaking a sweat.

 Firefox vs Internet Explorer
http://www.getfirefox.com/

 It stops annoying popups and it has tons of amazing plugins that can make surfing the web even better.