osalt.com - Open Source Alternatives

osalt.com is a site that lists Open Source alternatives to commercial applications. It is broken down into the following categories:

  • business
  • communications
  • databases
  • development
  • graphic applications
  • internet & networking
  • multimedia & audio
  • security & privacy
  • system utilities
  • web development

While most commercial products have an free alternative, there are sometimes features that the commercial product offers the the free one doesn't. For instance, you can generate PDF's with PDFCreator, but if you want to edit them (or add form fields), Adobe Acrobat is the only real option.

Sometimes the Open Source counterpart can be more unstable and lack technical support (there will be exceptions to that though - generally when the release version is greater than 1.0). With each release though, stability normally gets better.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Select box manipulation with jQuery

If you read the jQuery mailing list , you may be aware that I have updated my plugins for working with select boxes . Summary of changes: addOption replaces any options with the same value (so think of it as an add/replace options plugin selectOptions selected options in addition to what was already selected, but there is now an option for it not to do this There are two new methods: copyOptions which is for copying options between select boxes ajaxAddOption allows you to add options via AJAX (i.e. could be used for create options dynamically from a server script)
Read more

Basic Excel Spreadsheet Generation (ASP/ASP.NET)

The 'correct' way to generate Excel spreadsheets is through the use of Office Web Components . However, due to the licensing (see MSKB Article ) you cannot use them on a public internet site (as a client license for Office is needed for each user retrieving the document). However, this can be overcome due to the fact that Excel recognises HTML code. You can therefore output HTML that can be opened in Excel: First of all, set the content type and response header to make the browser handle it as an Excel spreadsheet. ASP VBScript: <%@Language="VBScript"%> <% Response.ContentType="application/vnd.ms-excel" Response.AddHeader "content-disposition", "attachment; filename=ExcelFileName" %> ASP JScript: <%@Language="JScript"%> <% Response.ContentType="application/vnd.ms-excel"; Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=ExcelFileName"); %
Read more

Link: HTML Agility Pack (.NET)

The HTML Agility Pack is an HTML parser for .NET, supporting XPATH and XSLT parsing. Basically the HTML equivalent of XmlDocument . Example use (from site): HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument(); doc.Load("file.htm"); foreach(HtmlNode link in doc.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("//a[@href]") { HtmlAttribute att = link["href"]; att.Value = FixLink(att); } doc.Save("file.htm");
Read more