Cynthia Harvey

It’s summer. And frankly, that means no one’s all that excited about working. Oh goodness no. In honor of the season of laziness, we’ve put together a list of some of the most fun open source downloads you can find. No, none of those office productivity tools here – just lots of games, hobbyists’ tools […]

The educational community has discovered open source tools in a big way. Analysts predict that schools will spend up to $489.9 million on support and services for open source software by 2012, and that only includes charges related to operating systems and learning management systems. Teachers, professors and home schoolers are using open source applications […]

While it’s pretty painless to convert from commercial office software to an open source version, if you’d like to replace commercial security products with open source counterparts, you’ll likely have to do some work. You may need to combine several open source tools to get the functionality you get from a single commercial product. Or […]

ALSO SEE: 50 Open Source Tools To Replace Popular Security Software • 50 Open Source Tools: Desktop Downloads • 51 Open Source Tools to Protect Your Identity Can open source toolsreplace all closed source software? That is, are open source tools – freely downloadable software – really just as good as software you have to […]

The universe of open source tools is large and rapidly expanding. If your desktop doesn’t look and perform exactly like you want it to, you really have no excuse. We found dozens of great open source tools that let you customize your desktop environment, whether you’re ready to try out a whole new operating system […]

As demonstrated by the nearly 500 open source downloads on this list, open source software has benefited from an explosion of creativity in the last several years. Indeed, the first decade of the 21st century could be called “the Decade of Open Source.”Since 2006, Datamation has put together at least 15 different lists of open […]

Many Windows users find themselves attracted to the idea of open source software, but aren’t quite ready to go all the way and commit to Linux on the desktop. However, they might be willing to make a smaller change, like replacing Internet Explorer with Firefox or switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org. With open-source newbies […]

ALSO SEE: Top Netbooks: the Eight Best Netbooks Compared Eighteen short months ago, Taiwanese manufacturer Asus debuted the Eee, the netbook that launched the latest craze for small, lightweight, inexpensive laptops. When the original 350,000 units – all equipped with Linux – sold out in just a few months, the open source community rejoiced. And […]

These days everyone is looking for a bargain, and laptop manufacturers are eager to deliver. Sure, you can still spend $1,000 (or much more) for state-or-the-art hardware that runs the latest versions of commercial software with ease. But now you can also get a netbook that does everything you really need for under $400. As […]

If you’re one of the millions of people with Gmail accounts, you already know how easy Google’s Web-based email is to use. You probably also already know that Gmail organizes messages into conversations, uses Google search technology to search your messages, and comes with an amazing and ever-growing amount of storage space. However, you may […]