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I am very much for open source software! My favorite is STEPMANIA!

Stepmania is a DDR simulator for Mac/PC. It allow you to program your own music and song files and add any song files that others have created. It also allows you to play DDR without a playstation.. (and for me that is a plus because I have no use otherwise for a playstation or xbox or whatever).

I also use Firefox, Mozilla, Thunderbird (at home), PHP & Apache.

I came from Academia where we are always broke and have to find new and cheap implementations for everything we do.. so open source is the obvious solution. Also with technology advancing as quickly as it does, we can't drop tons of money on software to have to keep upgrading or replacing it. Instead, we can build a better hardware infrastructure with that money.

Now that I am in the corp world, it is a little different. I really have to us MS Office to integrate with my coworkers*, but I get to pick everything else I use, and I try to steer them clear of MS internet technologies. Also, since I work for a cheap ass company and also freelance, I like the price tag of open-source products. I am the only tech & creative person at the company, so I constantly have to justify purchases (no one "understands the language" i speak), and if it's free, then I can get things done quicker.

But also as a designer, I still depend on the first-class design tools of Adobe and Macromedia.

I use thunderbird at home because it was easy to import my old unix inbox files into it, but use Apple Mail at work because I have to send attachments a lot and thunderbird does not have the feature of dragging a file to the docked icon and having it spring up a new email window with the file attached (very useful).

I wont go out of my way to use open-source products tho. Like the instance above with Apple Mail, if it doesnt suit my workflow, then I wont use it.

*I know they are compatible, but even the smallest bump with my coworkers and all hell breaks loose. It took me forever to get them to be able to open my .csv database drops.

I also do use Morzilla Firefox and Thunderbird!
So I am very much for opensource.

I use a lot open source software, like GNU/Linux, Mozilla, XMMS, The GIMP, vim, MySQL, Apache, Gaim, ... the usual stuff.

But I think sometimes OSS doesn't have the things required for daily use. Examples:

- Some OSS projects are often under development all the time. Sometimes there is no stable version for years. You either have to use an early version with many missing features or the latest buggy version. The Microsoft philiosophy - we all hate - is to bring out new products every x years, test them a bit, but sell them at a specific date, no matter how well it works. How it works with most OSS projects is not really better than that.

- Some OSS developers are maniacs; they include all useless stuff, pop out new versions of basis software every few months (like KDE, which forces you to work on your system all the time), and the software gets bloated like a Microsoft product. I need software that I install and work with - for several years. Every upgrade brings potential trouble. Never change a running system. I don't need 93 languages, high-res-vectorgraphics-icons and support for the craziest input methods at once. I also don't need all the XML stuff and spellchecking in a calculator.

- Every OSS project uses different libraries for its functions, so it's not unrealistic that you have five different spellcheckers or sound output servers at once. It would be nice if there's some consortium like the Linux kernel developers or the X11 developers for all the stuff that forms the base of other software. Of course they mustn't suffer from the two points above. They could create development targets for all free developers, arrange development, do quality management, and other neccessary things. It could be a democratic arrangement between all developers and users.

I've seen these problems very often. Therefore I have an old computer with high-quality classics like OS/2 as operating system, WordPerfect as word processor, and so on. These programs don't want much performance/ressources, are simple, and just well programmed

Citering

Original von erichazann
Stepmania is a DDR simulator for Mac/PC. It allow you to program your own music and song files and add any song files that others have created. It also allows you to play DDR without a playstation.. .

ehm, I must have missed something, never heard of DDR and I just tried to imagine what it could be by your description:
a stepsequencer like the old Amiga soundtracker programs, a 2D rendering studio or a game? or a little bit of everything?
sounds fun :lol:

I like to use OpenSource when I find stable or even better alternatives to closed source programs, e.g. Thunderbird, Firefox, OpenOffice.
But I have to admit that a lot of the tools that I use are freeware, but not open source.