The Free Web.

Of all the amazing opportunities available online the one that still excites me the most is without doubt OpenSource.

Although my only experience of it is as a user the concept of software and services freely offered and constructed by groups often simply for the fun of it or to fill a need and then freely distributed is in my opinion the highest achievement of the Internet thus far.

While learning and exploring both Website creation and Internet Marketing I’ve come across several great sites and programs that often offer equivalent or even better results than the professional packages.

Here’s a few of my favourites:

Faststone is an incredible piece of image editing and viewing software that’s not only flexible but powerful. It can open a wide range of differing file types with ease and includes many handy options for editing photos.

The interface is well designed to be instantly useable and although you can use it at a very basic level simply as a viewer it can also be applied at a professional level to edit and organise your gallery.

You can’t do any of the complicated editing that the likes of Photoshop can offer but almost everything else is a breeze.

7-Zip is an alternative to WinZip and WinRar, and even if you might get those programs installed along with your operating system 7zip actually offers better compression, and easier interface and better compatibility for a wider range of archives. 

Personally I use it exclusively simply for it’s ease and flexibility.

This a of specific use to Webmasters but is still worth a mention since it’s again one of the better known free FTP’S (File Transfer Protocol).

It’s easy to use and has everything any bought package can offer.

The only reason I don’t currently use it is because I was given another one called WiseFTP when joining a hosting company and have had no reason to change, but I’ve used both and have no doubt that FileZilla is another superb Opensource offering.

Now for something a bit more fun focused.

VLC is an incredible media player which has in my experience easily beaten all commercial options.

It’s light weight, easy to use and able to play an amazing range of file types with support for others if they aren’t in the original package.

The playback quality is very good and the user interface has everything you’d expect or ever need, this is the only player I ever use for films or music and there’s almost nothing it can’t do.

An alternative to VLC should you for some reason not get on with it is GOM Player which I personally don’t get on with quite as well, but it’s also a really strong piece of software and well worth a look if your in need of a player.

But it’s not just opensource software that’s free and very useful, there seems to be more and companies realising that it’s better to build a strong relationship with their potential customers as well as their paying customers so here are a couple sites that offer amazing products completely freely along side paid version.

The first one I’ve used a few times while creating websites such as this http://armbee-art.co.uk

And it offers an amazing range of beautiful Flash scripts and applications, which are both well made and offer easy customization and control.

I spent weeks searching for the right gallery script for the site above but nothing worked as well or as easily as the ones I found at FlashXML.

You can also purchase their scripts and receive added bonuses such as the removal of any flash XML advertising but from what I’ve seen so far the free offers are just as good and their advertising is the least I can do to pay them back for their work if I’m not willing to buy a license.

www.flashxml.net

The second is a site I’ve yet to properly use but from what I’ve seen they offer an incredibly powerful online editor for fully flash sites, that are easy to construct and look amazing!

It’s totally free to sign up and so easy to use I’ve heard of people creating professional looking pages in half an hour.

And after spending sometimes weeks creating pages via DreamWeaver and struggling with the complexities of Flash myself it’s all the more impressive that sites like the ones available through Wix can be done so quickly and easily.

www.wix.com

Basically what i've found is that almost every piece of software is now available for Free via either opensource or as the free side of a product or business.

So really the only thing that stops you from finding the right tool for your need is the time it takes to find it.