The Perfect List of Best Open Source Software For Your Business

In the past, open-source software was mainly found in private or hobby use. Meanwhile, however, more and more industries are getting used to their professional use - whether IT, automotive, or automation. What are the concrete advantages of open-source software in companies?

According to Red Hat's State of Enterprise Open Source study published in April 2019, 99% of IT executives confirm that open source software is at least "fairly important" for their IT strategy. In the design of embedded systems, for example, for the automotive industry or in the automation industry, decision-makers are increasingly getting used to allowing open-source software to be used in development.

Benefits of open-source software

Open-source software is more accessible to implement than proprietary software.
Open-source software offers the best scaling options when it comes to rapid business growth.
Open-source software provides more security compared to proprietary solutions.
Open-source software does not cost any license fees. Even though the costs of implementation, advice, support, etc., leading agencies still state that open source products save up to 50%.
Open-source software provides open interfaces and standards that enable small and medium-sized companies to increase their IT standards and security. Vendor independent and competitive.

The VLC media player plays music as well as video and audio media. It does not matter whether they are streamed to the player via the Internet or are stored locally as files on the computer. Alternatively, there is the Media Center Kodi, which is included in LibreELEC and converts a Raspberry Pi into a media player.

Audacity processes music and audio recordings. The editing software records sound, offers effects, and multiple tracks for mono, stereo, time, and text. With the plug-in for the LAME MP3 encoder, output as an MP3 file is possible.

Firefox is a browser from Mozilla that originated from the source code of the former Netscape Communicator. Firefox is one of the most significant browsers and can handle the latest web standards, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264. Mozilla also provides the Thunderbird email client, which downloads POP3 emails from the email provider's server and supports IMAP. Both Firefox and Thunderbird support encrypted connections with SSL / TLS.

In terms of security, VeraCrypt has succeeded TrueCrypt, whose source code has been checked. Back doors are not included, but updates usually fix some bugs. 7-Zip also creates encrypted archives, but is primarily a compression tool that can handle various files such as the widely used ZIP format.

The Notepad ++ editor offers significantly more functions than the editor pre installed under Windows. Notepad ++ knows the line endings of Mac, Windows, and Linux and supports various character encodings such as ANSI or UTF-8. Developers should find the text markup that is available for many programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, HTML, and JSON helpful. Ghostscript is famous for working with PostScript and PDF and is used as an auxiliary program by some PDF printers.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice are alternatives to Microsoft Office. The two office suites offer word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing program, and formula editor. They also support the Open Document Format (ODF), the open standard for office applications based on XML. Magazines, brochures and photo books are what Scribus does. The layout program designs pages and places images and text using the grid. Since Scribus knows CMYK and PDF / X-1a, among others, it is suitable for prepress.

In the area of graphics, the vector editor Inkscape is worth a look. The freeware works with the standardized SVG file format (Scalable Vector Graphics), but can also handle the PostScript, EPS, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PDF and PNG formats. Gimp enables complex image processing as an alternative to Photoshop. The image editing program offers a wide range of functions and can be expanded with plug-ins, although it also supports some Photoshop plug-ins. For the 3D design, some blenders allow animations for videos and video game characters.

Conclusion

Many decision-makers often do not even know that there is an equally suitable solution from the open source area for almost every commercial product. To harness the maximum potential from these software, it is best to hire open source developer who can provide deep insights since he carries significant knowledge of various workarounds and can tweak or mold the software in a way that best suits your business.

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