Although there are many arguments over the safety of  open-source software over proprietory systems, most studies show that open-source software does have a higher flaw discovery, quicker flaw discovery, and quicker turn around on patches. Open-Source is no longer just for programmers’ hobby projects with many big players such as Google and Sun Microsystems stepping into the arena. Even Microsoft, a bastion of proprietory software, has seen the need to begin participating to a larger degree with the open-source community. Here are just ten of the great pieces of software available as open-source projects.

Firefox

Firefox delivers a full featured and mostly standards driven browser platform. It’s extensible architecture and thousnads of available plugins has made it a favourite amongst web developers and web power-users alike. It continues to gain in popularity despite plenty of other alternatives available.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is a multi platform and multi lingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.

Paint.Net

Paint.Net is free image editing and photo manipulation software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools

WordPress

WordPress is a web content management system, primarily designed for blog hosting, it can be easily used to manage many different types of website. The development community supporting wordpress is huge and diverse giving rise to thousands of plugins to provide additional functionality.

Drupal

Drupal is another web content management system, this one is geared to creating community sites with built in modules for managing user profiles, discussion forums and multiple blogs. Like WordPress it has an active developer community with lots of modules available to extend it with.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia. It allows collaborative editing on documents within a familiar interface.

Pidgin

Pidgin is a multi network instant messaging client which allows you to login to many different accounts at once. At present it supports sixteen different networks.

ThunderBird

Another development from the Mozilla Foundation, Thunderbird is an email client which helps you better manage your unruly inbox and scales to the most sophisticated organizational needs while making it easy to find what you need.

Miro

An open source video player, Miro can play almost any type of video file and also makes it easy to watch web-based content with thousands of channels to choose from, integrated bittorrent and the ability to save videos from YouTube.

MySQL

Last but by no means least, MySQL is the worlds most popular open source database platform. MySQL was aquired by Sun Microsystems in February 2008 but remains an open-source platform. Thanks to Sun’s financial backing, MySQL is now being taken seriously as an enterprise-level database platform in addition to being the platform for the majority of recent (and not so recent) web applications.

Looking for more

For further research, many projects are under development at hub sites such as Sourceforge, Codeplex and Google’s Project Hosting

Credit due to Lifehacker for some of these.