The Pinged Hobbit

It’s annoying when you need to open a file that’s been sent to you only to find that you need some expensive piece of software to access it. You know how it is, someone sends you a psd file but you don’t own photoshop. What do you do? It’s happened to us all. But there are places out there that can help:

Open With: We’ve talked about Open With before. When you have a file with an extension you know it’s a great place to search to determine what program made the file and what open source programs there are there might be able to open it for you. Sure it has it’s faults, it might not always have the right programs type associated for with your extension but thats usually because more than one program might use that extension type. Usually when this happens it tends to be the case that the two programs are completely different so you can determine which one you are looking for.

Alternative to: Open with is great for just determining the file type, but what if you are just looking for an alternative to a particular program, say Photoshop. Well Alternative To is a site for finding alternative to many popular software packages. Simply go to the site, type in your software and click search to be presented with a list of alternative products that perform the same function. It’s list both free and open source alternatives to the program. Can be quite useful for getting some ideas of what to look for.

Wikipedia’s List of Open Source: Yes you should never use Wikipedia as a serious source of research for a college project but when it comes to information about the various different open source packages out there, you cant go far wrong. It’s always been updated by numerous contributors and the links then to always be the latest versions.

Downloadpedia’s Alternative’s to Commercial Software: Another often updated list. Broken down into sections and then in alphabetical order, the commercial software is listed with it’s alternatives beneath.

OSalt: For a long time OSalt has been my go to place for finding open source alternatives to commercial software. It might not be as pretty as Alternative to but it has an open source slant. Like Alternative to it shows commercial alternatives along with open source but unlike Alternative to the open source ones appear at the top of the page. It also makes it easy to tell which are paid for software and which are open source by colour coded dots (red for paid, green for open source). It’s an easy site to use and it’s given me many useful additions to my software library over the years.

Where do you go to find these alternative programs?