Moving to Open Source where possible

Given the usual press, you may think all IBM employees ever use on their work computers is Lotus Notes, but I assure you that much more is available to us internally – although Lotus Notes is our email/application platform, and that’s a good thing.

I’ve not lost email service for a good few years now, partly thanks to our move to a fully clustered / redundant Domino infrastructure about 2 years ago…

But besides mail/calendaring/collaborative apps, we’re welcome to use Open Source software, some of which is even available (like Firefox) on our automated software deployment webpage.

Here are the OSS packages I currently run on my Thinkpad, that I couldn’t live without:

- Eclipse: Used both for WBI Modeler 5.1.x and Rational App Developer 6.0, as well as stand-alone (v3.1)
- Filezilla: none other compares (that’s OSS and this simple/efficient)
- The GiMP: here to stay, as I stay clear from the Photoshop market dominance
- Firefox: tried every other browser, this one is here to stay
- Open Office: I wish we didn’t rely so much on MS Office internally, maybe this will change with Lotus Workplace now out (I also wish no one still used Lotus SmartSuite, but that’s another issue altogether)
- PuTTY: simple, powerful terminal emulator
- RSS Bandit: I’ve re-discovered the beauty of its’ newspaper reading style and it integrated with wBloggar.
- UltraVNC: to remotely compute on my Linux, AIX and OS X boxes.
- VLC Media Player: I installed it on every computer I own…
- WinSCP3: Norton Commander on steroids!

P.S. This list has changed a little from what I wrote in March 2005 (What OSS / Freeware do I use on my work Thinkpad). If you’ve read this blog a little, you know each of these packages wen through the acid test, and have stood the test of time. I am even trying out a few OSS games I downloaded this weekend (from sourceforge.net):

Scorched3D: this is tough! I’ll have to practice more and get a crash course on ballistics 101
VegaStrike: re-creation of a classic (Elite), tough to learn, but should be worth it

I also run a few freeware packages and will try to respect the author’s wish as much as possible of not using them for commercial purposes, hey, I sell software for a living, I’d be a fool not to walk the talk…