Sofftware
Applications (cont.)
Graphic Manipulation and Vector Drawing
GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP): This is a very powerful manipulation program (like Adobe's Photoshop) which has everything a graphic artist needs to manipulate images. It is part of the GNU Project, and it is released under the GNU General Public License.
Inkscape: This is a very good program which provides a way to include information on the license used for the created graphics. It has the W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as its native format. It is available under the GNU General Public License.
Scribus: This is an excellent program to create the covers and design for books, it is an excellent replacement for MS Publisher. It is released under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).
Free Fonts
GNU FreeFont: This project aims to provide a useful set of free outline (i.e. OpenType) fonts covering as much as possible of the Unicode character set. The set consists of three typefaces: one monospaced and two proportional (one with uniform and one with modulated stroke).
Gentium: This is an excellent font created for the purpose of covering a great range of characters used worldwide with Latin characters, Greek characters, and Cyrillic, along with the accents and diacritic signs. It is available under the OFL.
Linux Libertine: An excellent replacement for proprietary fonts such as MS Times New Roman. It is dual licensed under the GNU GPL and the Open Font License (OFL).
Liberation Fonts: These fonts, created with the efforts of Red Hat and Ascender Corporation are metrically equivalent to proprietary fonts such as MS Times New Roman (Liberation Serif), MS Arial (Liberation Sans), and MS Courier New (Liberation Mono). They were created for people to use freely, regardless of their office suite programs. These fonts are licensed under the GNU GPL + font exception license.
Ezra SIL Hebrew Unicode Font: When I need Hebrew fonts, this is perhaps the best free Hebrew font I have ever found. It is available under two free software licenses: OFL (the whole code), and the MIT License (for Hebrew layout intelligence).
Videos and Music
VLC: Is a free media player which can almost play every video and audio codec found on the Internet (with the exception of Real codecs). It is becoming gradually the alternative to Windows Media Player as it is becoming far less problematic with the problems with DRM and access to some copyrighted material. It also offers the user the opportunity to not switch from player to player depending on the codec, but instead looking every video file with one player. It is also useful to watch DVDs in your computer. Finally, it has a nice addition: it plays OggVorbis (audio) and OggTheora (video), two free formats which are the alternative to other proprietary formats. It is available for all operative systems: MS Windows, MacOS, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and many others.
Amarok: Perhaps, of all the GNU/Linux players, for me, this one is the best. Its defect is being heavy and consuming memory. However, it is wonderful to play all kinds of music such as MP3s and OggVorbis. It lets the user organize his or her own music, and even it is an ideal program in the free software world to even organize and load the MP3s you may have to your iPod. The only thing that it cannot do is to play video.
Songbird: This is becoming a very popular music player. Based on Mozilla-Firefox's code, it is light, easy to use player. It even plays certain formats such as OggVorbis format. This is, after amaroK the second best music player in the free software world. It can be used even with the iPod or other devices.
Linux Special Interest Group
