The open source world is filled with software that can be used along with the proprietary Windows operating system, without causing any inconvenience. Here’s a selection of software that is free, open source and compatible with MS Windows.
The expression ‘open source software’ refers to software that is available free, and its source code has been made publicly available for study, modification and use on any system. Often, the goal in releasing this source code is to enable community collaboration in developing this software in a more open, efficient and rapid manner. Depending on the licence, open source software can have different terms for unrestricted usage.
Microsoft Windows is representative of a family of operating systems released over the years, each catering to an industry, or customised to fit a subset of business and development purposes.
Microsoft has long faced flak from the Linux community for keeping its operating system closed source, even as it manages to outsell all Linux distributions, combined. Yet, Microsoft has recently become a member of the Linux Foundation and maintains a presence on GitHub. It has upped its commitment to software developers and the open source community with the recent and rapid release of a lot of features, especially the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which allows developers to run the Linux command line directly in Windows without the overhead of a virtual machine. Some popular features of the new Windows release include increased control over the task manager, an inbuilt package manager, multi-desktop support, and so on.
Let us take a closer look at the various categories of open source software available for use on Windows.
Web browsers
This story is from the November 2017 edition of Open Source For You.
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This story is from the November 2017 edition of Open Source For You.
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