I’m a big fan of open source software. What I’m an even bigger fan of is finding websites that help consolidate open source application information, like osalt.com, and more recently, OpenDisc.

With OpenDisc, they go beyond listing links of open source applications available for download. In fact, the folks at OpenDisc actually create .iso image files of several popular open source applications that you can download and burn to CD. They have a regular and an educational .iso image to choose from.

This will definitely come in handy the next time I have to re-format a computer for the parents.

I was looking for an open-source program to burn some files to a CD, and remembered a site I bookmarked a while back called osalt.com, aka Open Source as ALTernative. Great site…it’s sort of a directory/database of sorts where you enter the name of a commercial program and it will return all the open source alternative programs available.

Example, if you entered “Photoshop” in their search form, you will find a slew of open source alternatives, such as paint.NET and GIMP. Mind you, some of these open source programs may not have the feature set or functionality as some of the commercially available equivalent applications out there, but if you’re looking to do something that’s not terribly complex, this site is a good place to start looking.