10 Most Popular Open Source Software Ever!

Open Source software are never the less one of the biggest innovations in the history of technology. Simply buy an all new computer device and install any software you want without spending a single penny (except the internet datacharges). It offers you everything from a free word processor, free image editor, media player, sound editor, file archiver, PDF creator and what not. Although a few of these software might not stand parallel to its commercial rivals in terms of functionality, there are many that stand far beyond of everything else on the market in terms of features and capabilities.

So here we bring to you the best open source projects ever created. And if you haven't used any of them yet, we strongly recommend all of these applications.

1. WordPress

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL which runs on a web hosting service. Features include a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 18.9 per cent of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013. WordPress is currently the most popular blogging system being used on the Web, powering over 202 million websites worldwide. Besides blogs, WordPress is also being used for online shops based on its e-commerce themes, online magazine using its magazine theme, portfolios using its WordPress portfolio themes, Galleries on its WordPress gallary themes for photographers and designers.

2. Magento

Magento is an open source e-commerce web application that was launched on March 31, 2008. It was developed by Varien (now Magento Inc) with help from the programmers within the open source community but is owned solely by Magento Inc. Magento was built using the Zend Framework. It uses the entity-attribute-value (EAV) database model to store data.

The software is currently used by around 30,000 merchants around the world including biggies like Samsung and Nespresso. It is indeed one of the world’s fastest growing e-commerce platform. The Community Edition of Magento is offered for free under the Open Software License. Although its Enterprise Edition requires you to pay and offers features like multi-store capability, store credits and gift cards.

3. Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is again a free and open source web browser developed for Windows, OS X and Linux, with a mobile version for Android, by Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine to render web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards.

The browser currently accounts for around 24.43 per cent of the total usage share of the web browsers and the figure is continuously on the rise. With its third party add-ons that lets you customize your browsers to the finest of the details, Mozilla Firefox is a highly preferred browser for most web professionals.

4. Pidgin

Pidgin which was formerly known as Gaim is an open-source multi-platform instant messaging client, based on a library named libpurple. Libpurple has support for many commonly used instant messaging protocols, allowing the user to log into various services from one application. The number of Pidgin users is estimated to be over 5 million.

The client lets the user simultaneously interact with different people no matter what instant messaging platform they’re using.

5. FileZilla

Despite a similar sounding name, Filezilla is not connected to Mozilla in any manner! Its a free and cross-platform FTP software, consisting of FileZilla Client and FileZilla Server. Binaries are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It supports FTP, SFTP, and FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS). As of now it is one of the top 9th most popular download of all time from SourceForge.net with 240.6M.

6. Audacity

Audacity is a free open source digital audio editor and recording computer software application, available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other operating systems. Audacity was started by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg at Carnegie Mellon University. Alone on SourceForge the software has around 80.5 million downloads. The application also won the SourceForge 2007 and 2009 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia. Users can record and edit live audio by cutting, copying, splicing and mixing sounds and can also convert ageing tapes and records into digital format.

7. GIMP

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an image retouching and editing tool which is released under the LGPLv3 and later versions and the GPLv3 and later versions as free and open-source software. Tailored versions are available for most of the operating systems including Linux, OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

GIMP has tools used for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, resizing, cropping, photo-montages, converting between different image formats, and more specialized tasks. Animated images such as GIF and MPEG files can be created using an animation plugin.

8. OpenOffice

Apache OpenOffice is amongst the well known open source office suites available today. It is packed with tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and databases. Apache OpenOffice can save your documents in OpenDocument format, read-only Microsoft Word documents of proper Microsoft Word format.

It is released under the Apache License. The recent 3.4.1 version of Apache OpenOffice is supported by Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. And it does not carry any license fee.

9. VLC

VLC media player (commonly known as VLC) is a portable free and open-source cross-platform media player and streaming media server written by the VideoLAN project. VLC media player supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-Video, video CD and streaming protocols. It is able to stream over computer network and to transcode multimedia files. The software is currently the No. 1 most downloaded software at sourceforge.net with 868.9M downloads.

The default distribution of VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins. Many of VLC's codecs are provided by the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project, but it uses mainly its own muxer and demuxers and its own protocols implementations. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux and OS X by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library.

10. 7-Zip

7-Zip is an open source file archiver, or an application used to compress files. 7-Zip operates with the 7z archive format, but can read and write several other archive formats. The program can be used from a command line interface, graphical user interface, or with a window-based shell integration. 7-Zip began in 1999 and is developed by Igor Pavlov and has already crossed 328.3M downloads on sorceforge. The cross-platform version of the command line utility, p7zip, is also available.

The program supports 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP, WIM, ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR, Z.