The Open Source Answer to Photoshop

The real sign of a piece of tech's success is when it makes the transformation from being just a product to a verb used to describe the very action it does.  Take Google for example.  It started out as being one of a number of search engines available to internet users to find content on the web.  However, due to its popularity it quickly became a replacement for the verb search.  In this day and age we no longer search for something on the internet we "Google it."  While Google is synonymous with search, Photoshop is synonymous with image editing.  The phrase "I photoshopped it" pervades in both television and movies.  While Photoshop is the most popular image editing choice it is not cheap and a license for Photoshop costs seven hundred dollars.  Luckily as with most programs, the open source community has provided a free and reliable alternative in the form of GIMP.

Every Office Should Be Open

If you used a computer for any form of word processing you most likely used Microsoft Word.  Microsoft Word came to be in 1983 and has dominated the business of word processing for countless years.  The only real competitor it had was Corel's Word Perfect which was a worthy opponent up until the Nineties when Microsoft was able to pull ahead in the race.  Today Microsoft Word is part of Microsoft's Office suite and is pre-installed on many Windows machines and the standard for most businesses.  However, it does not have to be that way.  There are many freeware options available for the consumer willing to break away from the sheep.