I have been doing a lot of research about open source software because it is one of the things I need to do an article for my boss in two weeks. I enjoyed reading and learning about it, a first in my job. Open source software are programs developed by developers which source codes can be viewed, edited, altered and enhanced by members of the community who use it (Of course, restrictions apply). Users can distribute the program, modified or not, without any copyright infringements (again, certain rules apply).

You might be surprised how we use open source software programs everyday – Firefox, Media Player, FileZilla and XVid converters are great examples.

Here are a few more:
1. MPlayer
- It is a a movie player which runs on many systems, you can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies

2. Notepad ++
- It has more enhancements over the WordPad, a basic tool for programmers and encoders. Some of these are drag-and-drop, multiple clipboard availability, split screen editing, spell checker, find and replace multiple documents, and file comparison.

3. OpenOffice
- It runs and operates like Microsoft Office, having word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics.

4. Pidgin Chat Client
- You can connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once on one interface (the chat client).

5. PuTTY
- You can use this for SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP computing protocols and as a serial console client.