I was thinking about how much I’ve come to depend on open source tools since I first discovered the movement’s existence. This activity obviously resulted in a list of the projects I use regularly and those I intend to try in the future. Well this is a selection of a few of my favourites.

Mozilla Firefox.

This is my browser of choice for Windows and Linux, though I must admit that I quite like Safari on the Mac.

Mozilla Thunderbird.

For reasons of compatibility I use Thunderbird as my email client on all my machines.

Freemind.

This is an excellent tool I use to think ideas through, plan documents like this one and even organise my revision notes before dreaded exams.

Fedora Core (FC) Linux and all the goodies that come with it!

I’ve tried a few flavours of Linux over the years, but have come to settle on this one. It’s the Operating System (OS) that runs all my servers and I have recently started playing with it on the desktop. In my experience it is stable and well supported.

Apache HTTP Server with PHP installed.

Running on FC servers this is my primary web platform as it’s well supported by a large community, quick and easy to use. I am thinking of trying Apache Tomcat with Java soon, but will certainly continue to use this platform.

Wordpress.

This is new to me, as is this site built around it. A little early to tell how good it is yet… time will tell!

MySQL.

Where would my web applications be without MySQL providing the backend storage? Probably using another open source database, there are plenty to choose from! However, this is an old favourite and one of the industry standards.

OpenSSH.

I wouldn’t try and access remote systems any other way. I’ve used proprietary SSH applications, but this is easily as good given that it has to avoid proprietary cryptography algorithms.

Eclipse.

For simple XHTML/CSS work a text editor will do, but for more complex programming work I tend to use the Eclipse platform with a selection of suitable components, of which there are many.

Subversion.

Installed on my development server this version control software is powerful and, in my experience, reliable. It is well supported and has a range of tools for client access from any of the platforms I use.

Thanks to everyone involved in these projects. If I’d had to buy licenses for all this I probably wouldn’t have been able to do a fraction of the things I have over the last couple of years. I’ve learned a lot as a result of your efforts and it is greatly appreciated. I hope to be able to contribute myself in the very near future, but that is a story for another day.