By now all of you know how the IT Industry milks money out of consumers. Yes, that's right. Take out a product and then keep upgrading it again and again without any backward compatibility. The consumers will be forced to upgrade and shelling out more and more money. It is like the present day motherboards not supporting the 10 or 20 GB hard disks and forcibly having to buy the 40 or higher GB HDD. This much capacity is totally useless to most users like me and unless one is a gaming enthusiast, most of your storage space will be empty.

Though there is no escaping this tactic of the industry with respect to hardware, it is not the same with the software. Firstly the cost of software is so high that even the one time payment itself is something most users can't afford and most people make do with whatever is bundled with the new computer.

But now with the advent and free availability of open source software we don't have to shell out more money. I downloaded the Mozilla firefox Internet browser on the advice of a friend and I have never had a problem browsing the Internet, as against the Microsoft Internet Explorer which constantly tried to trick me into visiting the Microsoft site under some pretext or the other.

(You can read his Xombyte on the Firefox: http://www.xomba.com/how_i_overcame_effects_of_xombas_heavy_traffic_using_google_firefox

Anyway i have compiled a list of open source software for the benefit of the community. Mind you, this is not piracy but totally legal.

Word Processing:
* OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) - for word processing, spreadsheets, slide presentation, database, and image creation software.
* Abiword (http://www.abisource.com/)- Word processor.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets (http://docs.google.com) - Everything the MS Office has.

Web Browsers
* Seamonkey (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/)
* Opera (http://www.opera.com)

Internet Security
* Zone Alarm (http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/company/products/znalm/freeDownload.jsp)
* AVG Anti-Virus (http://free.grisoft.com/)

Webmail
* Yahoo! (http://mail.yahoo.com)
* Hotmail (http://www.hotmail.com)
* Gmail (http://www.gmail.com)

Desktop Mail
* Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/)
* Eudora (http://www.eudora.com)
* Seamonkey (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/)

Photo-editing programs
* The GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/windows/)
* Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/)

Media Players
* VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)
* MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/)
* Media Monkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/)

Web Authoring Software
* Nvu (http://nvu.com/index.php)
* Aptana (http://www.aptana.com/)

Instant Messengers
* Gaim (http://gaim.sourceforge.net/)
* Trillian (http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/)

Operating System
* Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com)
* Mandriva (http://www.mandriva.com/download)
* ReactOS (http://www.reactos.org/)

Have a ball and never spend Money again on Software.