Open Source

Generally, “open source” refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design. Open-source code is typically a collaborative effort where programmers improve upon the source code and share the changes within the community so that other members can help improve it further. Open source software is free. Some organizations have capitalized off of providing support and modification services for open source software such as RedHat, Inc.

VLC Media Player

March 18, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Multimedia

vlc-logo

Availability: Free Download
Comparable: Quicktime

VLC media player (commonly known as VLC) is a portable, free and open-source, cross-platform media player and streaming media server written by the VideoLAN project.

VLC media player supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-Video, video CD and streaming protocols. It is able to stream media over computer networks and to transcode multimedia files.

The default distribution of VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins.  It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux and OS X.

Tags: media player

Celestia

March 18, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Analysis & ModelingDesign & Visualization
Availability: Free Download
celestiaComparable: Google Earth, Starry Night Pro, Stellarium

Celestia is a free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.  All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A ‘point-and-goto’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.  Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that’s not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

Thunderbird

March 18, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Network & Communications

Mozilla_Thunderbird_logo

Availability: Free Download
Comparable: Outlook

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, extensible, cross-platform email, news, and chat client developed by the Mozilla Foundation.

Thunderbird is an email, newsgroup, news feed, and chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter) client. It supports POP and IMAP methods of connecting to email servers. It also supports LDAP (directory) address completion. The built-in RSS/Atom reader can also be used as a simple news aggregator. Thunderbird supports the S/MIME standard, extensions such as Enigmail add support for the OpenPGP (security)standard. The vanilla version is not a personal information manager, although the Mozilla Lightning extension adds PIM functionality. Additional features, if needed, are often available via other extensions.

Tags: news