Open Source for Professionals

There are many open source options available for professionals
to help them in their complex tasks. The tools mentioned here
come mainly in two forms – as an offline installation, or as a
web service and accessible over a browser. To strike a balance,
we have covered just a few in brief and offered links to a whole
lot more for the inquisitive professional to look up.
While there surely is a bias towards Linux when it comes
to open source, there are a few Windows-only applications. The
selection of an application to review has also been influenced
by the relative lack of awareness about Linux installation
procedures among the general population. The Windows
user can take comfort in the fact that since these Linux only
applications are open source, the source code will be available
and can be compiled for Windows (compiling instructions
are not provided here). It needs to be noted that in the
case of the very few Windows-only applications, sometimes
their dependence on proprietary libraries such as the .NET
framework make it impossible to run them in Linux. Emulators
do exist that offer middle ground – Cygwin (www.cygwin.com) for
running Linux applications in Windows and Wine (www.winehq.
org) to run Windows applications in Linux.
A more general caseis that of Debian, avenerable Linux distrowith probably the largest package database. Debian
offers different blends
of their popular distro
targeted at different pros.
For example, Debian Med
is a blend containing all
packages related to the
medical field. Blending
merely involves getting
the packages related to
the particular field, so
to create a Debian Medblend the packages that related to the medical industry can be
downloaded from their repositories (these packages are listed
at http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/). A blend for scientific
pursuits (in different fields) exists and can be researched at
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience. Similar distros exist for almost
every field discussed in this article, and needless to say, we shall
limit ourselves to only mentioning the names of such distro
along with relevant links