Maintained
by Barry
Campbell.
Your comments, notes, corrections and
additions are invited and encouraged.
Version 0.24 -- Last updated 20 November
2005.
Current
version can always
be found here:
/resources/knowledge_worker_toolbox.html
Why is the topic of "free software for knowledge workers" interesting? Well, there are certainly philosophical, political, and practical reasons to support the use of Open-Source tools and technologies that have nothing to do with economics, but let's face it: outfitting a personal computer with the software that you need to do your job, if you manipulate information for a living, is incredibly expensive!
Just to whet your appetite, let's do a quick price-comparison. We're assuming that you're starting from scratch with a new PC that has a recent Microsoft Windows OS installed, and you need to set yourself up to do "knowledge work" - writing documents, crunching numbers, creating presentations, drawing business diagrams, creating electronic documentation for online distribution, and so forth.
What's it going to cost you? Let's look at a bare minimum configuration - office productivity suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool); a drawing package for doing diagrams; a graphics package for editing photographs and creating/editing bitmapped graphics; and tools for creating HTML and PDF files for electronic distribution of your documents. (We'll be charitable and won't inflict the Professional editions of any of the Adobe or Microsoft products on you, and we'll pick Corel PaintShop Pro instead of the much more expensive Adobe PhotoShop.) Unless otherwise noted, each free alternative to commercial software packages can read and write the same file formats that the commercial package uses, so exchanging documents with colleagues or project collaborators doesn't present huge logistical difficulties.
| Commercial tool | Approximate "Street Price" (all prices in USD, reference: CompUSA, November 2005) | Free/Open
Source Tool |
Cost |
| Microsoft Office 2003 Standard | $400 | OpenOffice.org | $0 |
| Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard Edition | $300 | CutePDF Writer + Ghostscript + Ghostview | $0 |
| Microsoft Visio 2003 Standard Edition | $200 | Dia (note: not file-compatible with Visio) | $0 |
| Macromedia Dreamweaver MX | $410 | Nvu | $0 |
| Corel Paint Shop Pro X | $100 (after mail-in rebate of $30) | The GIMP | $0 |
| TOTAL | $1410 | TOTAL | $0 |
If we'd gone with the Professional editions of the Adobe and Microsoft products, and picked PhotoShop instead of PaintShop Pro, we'd already be well north of $2000. And these are just bare-bones requirements for "knowledge work"... we're not doing anything interesting with multimedia authoring, we haven't installed any security (anti-virus, anti-spyware) software...
Interested yet?
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| Commercial application... | What it does... | Freeware and/or Open-Source
equivalent... (unless otherwise noted, free tools are file-compatible with commercial tools) |
| Adobe Acrobat | Create, edit and read PDF files (Adobe Reader is, of course, free) | CutePDF Writer + Ghostscript + Ghostview |
| Adobe Audition (formerly "CoolEdit Pro") | Digital sound editor | Audacity |
| Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, CorelDraw, Xara X | Create and edit vector (line) drawings and illustrations | Inkscape
As of November 2005, Inkscape is not as full-featured as many commercial vector graphics packages, but it is under active development and very promising. |
| Adobe
PhotoShop, Corel Paint Shop Pro |
Create and edit bitmap graphics (photographs) | The GIMP (GNU Image Processor) |
| AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, various IRC and ICQ clients... | Send and receive instant text messages over the
Internet; many programs support sending data files, voice and video as
well. (All of these clients are typically free, but to a greater or lesser extent proprietary, meaning, e.g., that you can only use AOL IM to talk to people on the AOL IM network. The new GoogleTalk uses the open-source Jabber protocol, but that isn't widely implemented yet in other tools.) |
GAIM
is a
free, open-source, multiple-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac OSX)
IM
client that handles communications over nine different IM
networks:
AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, IRC, SILC, Jabber,
Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise
Messenger, and Zephyr. (Note: Jabber compatibility means that
it should work with the new GoogleTalk.) Trillian Basic is a freeware application that consolidates IM communications over the Big Five major networks: AIM, MSN, Yahoo, IRC and ICQ. (An inexpensive for-pay version, Trillian Pro, adds some other features.) |
| Macromedia Dreamweaver | Create, edit and manage HTML pages and web sites | Nvu As of November 2005, Nvu is in full release version 1.0; it offers reliable and well-developed WYSIWYG editing of HTML and basic CSS and site management features. It is not a complete functional replacement for Dreamweaver, as it lacks (e.g.) that product's team/collaboration features; very usable for authoring, however. |
| Microsoft Internet Explorer | Web browser | Mozilla Firefox |
| Microsoft Office 2003 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint in Standard edition; plus Access, Outlook in Professional Edition) | Office productivity (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database) | OpenOffice.org
(Writer, Calc, Impress, Base) + Draw (line drawing application) Note: The Version 2 release candidate (very late beta, in other words) is very stable and full-featured as of early October 2005. |
| Microsoft Outlook 2003 | E-mail client (also does calendar/schedule, contact management/address book, etc.) | Mozilla
Thunderbird (for e-mail, newsgroups, contact management, RSS) For calendaring functions: Yahoo! Mail provides online calendars with meeting reminders, schedule management, invitations, group calendaring, etc. |
| Microsoft Visio 2003 | Template-based line drawing package | Dia (Note: not file-compatible with Visio) Dia is still in relatively early development but appears very promising. It's especially useful for people working with UML. |
| Norton Internet Security Suite | Antivirus + Software firewall | AVG Antivirus + ZoneAlarm Free |
| Windows Notepad | Plain-text editor (not very powerful, can't open large files) | ConTEXT
(programmers' text editor with syntax highlighting) jEdit (cross-platform, Java-based programmers' text editor) |
| WS-FTP Pro | File Transfer Protocol client; supports Secure FTP | FileZilla |
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| Application... | What it does... | What it costs... |
| Google Desktop Search | Indexes the documents on your hard drive and enables fast full-text search. New version 2.0 offers additional desktop features. | Free |
| IrfanView | Multiformat graphics viewer and (light) editor | Free |
| Skype | Free voice-over-IP telephony to other Skype clients; very inexpensive dialout to landline and cell phones around the world. | Software: free. Skype-to-Skype calls: free. Calls to phones in most of the developed world cost about two Eurocents per minute (as of early October 2005) |
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| Application... | What it does... | Potential alternative(s)... |
| Adobe Framemaker | Industrial-strength technical publishing | A combination of open-source XML editing, parsing and
production tools, used with a
standard XML DTD for technical documentation, such as DocBook. Bruce Byfield argues in this article that OpenOffice Writer can be seriously considered as a functional replacement for FrameMaker. |
| Microsoft Project 2003 | Project management: scheduling, charting, resource management and leveling | There is a
comprehensive list of open-source project management tools here.
None of them are a complete functional replacement for
Project, and most seem to be in a very early stage of development but
most users tend to use Project as a presentation tool rather than for
hard-core resource management, so one or more of these might
be useful replacements. See also: Startwright's Project Management Templates and Tools directory. |
| Macromedia Robohelp | Authoring system for online help file creation | Create non-proprietary help systems using a standard HTML editor. |
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| Application... | What it does... | What it costs... |
| Sunbelt Software CounterSpy | Anti-spyware software; finds and removes spyware and other malware; provides active protection against malware installation. Winner of numerous awards as "best in class," including PC World's "World Class" and "Best Buy" awards. | $20/single license NOTE: Microsoft's currently free beta version AntiSpyware Tool uses the same codebase as CounterSpy, though Microsoft provides their own malware definitions, which is a subject of some controversy. The former "usual suspects" in the freeware anti-spyware category, AdAware Personal Edition and Spybot Search and Destroy, have slipped badly in recent months and do not offer active protection. Strongly consider a commercial product in this category. |
| TechSmith Snagit | Screen capture and editing program. If you write documentation or develop training for software, this program will save you enormous amounts of time and frustration; best bang-for-the-buck currently installed on my computer. | 30-day free trial; $40 to buy |
| Textpad | Very full-featured plaintext editor with macros | 30-day free trial; $30 to buy |
| ZoneAlarm Security Suite | Software firewall, antivirus, anti-spam in a single package. Winner of numerous awards as "best in class," including PC World's Editor's Choice. | $70 |
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